Digital Home Thoughts: Tom's Hardware Asks How Much RAM You Really Need

"Once the pride of the so-called upper middle class in the United States, McMansions and SUVs have now become symbols of excess and waste--at least the reminders of an era past. Green movement proponents should certainly be happy that so many “earth abusers” are beginning to see the light, but what about performance-computing fanatics? With memory prices near record lows, is there any good reason not to fill every slot with low-cost 2 GB DIMMs?"

While netbooks and nettops are smoking sales charts, they usually come with pretty weak configurations, limiting their use. When you need to do more demanding work like editing large photos, video editing or gaming, a traditional PC, usually a desktop, is in order and with that the question is how much RAM should you get. Fortunately, gone are the days where manufacturers try to pass off systems that barely have enough RAM to load the OS without swapping, but extra RAM can certainly help. For the past while, 4-6GB has been the sweet spot in terms of price and performance. Tom's Hardware does a check to see if this still holds true or whether things have changed, and buckets of RAM can improve performance. I'll leave their results to the article, but I'll say that in general, someone should get as much as they can reasonably afford, even to the point of reaching at least 4-6GB of RAM over a faster CPU, because once the OS starts swapping, that smoking CPU will spend most of its time waiting for work. Another caveat is that if you plan on having more than 3GB of RAM and using Windows, make sure you use the 64 bit version (XP, Vista, etc) or the extra RAM you've got will just go to waste.