24 GB Ram, is it too much as of today.

[insider]

I upgraded my Desktop from 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz to another two 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz sticks taking it to a total of 24GB Ram (I can never have 32 GB Ram as my Coolermaster EVO 212 heatsink fan is slightly over my first RAM slot and I have no intention of switching to liquid cooling just to gain a slot, I am very happy with air cooling, liquid cooling although very affordable to me, I find reports of leakage, radiators failing within a year and all such horrors on the net for almost all reputed brands in liquid cooling and I don't want to compromise my computer for an extra 10 degree reduction.

Oh where was I, yes in the olden stone age when I had 128MB Ram in my first computer adding an extra 256MB Ram used to make a noticeable difference in performance right from gaming to almost everything, then I added 512MB and got a bigger boost, times changed from DDR it was DDR2 then and from 512MB it was all the way upto 1GB,2GB, 4GB, DDR3 and a switch to 64bit OS and I was enjoying 8GB until last month for almost a year.

Now since DDR4 is introduced the price of DDR3 has come down as I have experienced before it will soon go out of stock in a year or a little more and then the price of DDR3 Ram will be double of what it is as of today and since I don't intend on upgrading my CPU or motherboard any time soon, so I packed it up to 24GB ( the maximum my motherboard can take is 32 but 24 sounds enough ), but I am not able to see the performance jump, that I had before in my 128MB to 256MB days, I can see 3540MB RAM being used right now with just chrome open and of course the RAM usage throttles upto 7-8GB while doing intensive work like developing my Unity game, etc.

I don't play games, I have no time for them so perhaps that could be a reason why I can't feel the immediate boost.
But how useful would 24GB be for regular usage in Ogre,Unity,Photoshop, etc.

One of my friends had 32GB Ram in his desktop more than 5 years ago, if I can't feel any memory adrenaline today, I am not sure what games/software could have possibly have given him the delight 5 years back.

[xrgo]

Ram is used to store running things, with 8gb maybe some demanding apps/games would need more than that, so the system would start swapping and it would get slow... so.. upgrading to more ram would eliminate that problem and you'll notice a performance improvement =D
But maybe you never use those kind of demanding software, so more ram is useless.

I have 8gb and I do design2d/3d, programming, ogre, etc and to be honest there are few apps that makes me want to have more ram: quixel Ddo while painting 4k textures, Photoshop while doing some really high res images, and After Affects.

Obviously another case scenario that more ram is useful is when opening tons of apps at the same time, I personally don't do that so often.
get an SSD if you don't have one already, that's an improvement you'll notice!

hey I am not a hardware guru, lets see what others have to say

[shadowfeign]

Also be careful that if you are running windows, I've heard you may need to upgrade to pro for it to register more than 16 GB even with 64 bit.

[insider]

Also be careful that if you are running windows, I've heard you may need to upgrade to pro for it to register more than 16 GB even with 64 bit.

Yes I am running Windows 7 Professional 64bit and it does show up as 24GB RAM.

[insider]

get an SSD if you don't have one already, that's an improvement you'll notice!

Well I have 10TB of internal storage and might be able to squeeze in an SSD too in future

[insider]

And of course the reason to upgrade was to secure the RAMs, I tried to add another 4GB Corsair 1333Mhz to my Dad's computer and now 1333's are almost non-existent in stores and is sold at double the price online, luckily my Dad's PC also takes 1600Mhz so I also got a 8GB stick for him. I know 24GB is a little too much, but a year later I won't be able to buy them anywhere even if I want them.

Just out of curiosity what impact does RAM frequency have, is there any noticeable difference between a 1333Mhz and 1600Mhz RAM of the same capacity?

[cybereality]

I have 32 GB DDR4 in my main development machine. I think that is a fine number and haven't had any problems.

For sure, the 8GB is almost a bare minimum (I have 8 in another machine, and have had Windows run out of RAM space with barely anything going on).

16GB is probably a good middle-ground, and I don't think any games would need more than this. It makes sense if you're doing dev work on the same machine, 8GB is cutting it close with many apps open.

[syedhs]

If you have extra RAM slotted already in your machine (and apparently under-used), you probably can transform the excess into ramdrive. I have not done it for a long time, but I have heard that they are useful, provided that you have UPS attached to your computer. Otherwise, a power blackout will cause your hours of unsaved work. C++ compilation is probably as fast as SSD, though you will need to remember to copy the source code back to HD when you want to power down your machine..

[insider]

If you have extra RAM slotted already in your machine (and apparently under-used), you probably can transform the excess into ramdrive. I have not done it for a long time, but I have heard that they are useful, provided that you have UPS attached to your computer. Otherwise, a power blackout will cause your hours of unsaved work. C++ compilation is probably as fast as SSD, though you will need to remember to copy the source code back to HD when you want to power down your machine..

Actually I have tried that before a few years back when 4GB itself was considered a luxury, I remember getting a considerable boost using Ramdrive, but I can't remember why I stopped using it.
Anyway I'll be getting a SSD soon, my cabinet is a CoolerMaster STORM and has a dedicated SSD cage (which I had removed to fit an extra bottom 120mm fan for cooling my GPU), guess I'll consider putting it back.

Thanks guys and any added input is always appreciable.

[lingfors]

I upgraded my computer last christmas, and I got 64GB of DDR4 RAM. A little worried that it's not enough, but sadly that's all my poor mobo could use.

Just kidding, I'm sure it's enough for now and for some time to come. My plan is to not have to upgrade again for some years. And also, one use case is to run a VM with Linux together with Win10, which my old setup (4GB) had some problems doing.

Also, it helped with my latest Ogre project, where I was easily consuming many GBs of RAM. Sometimes it's nice when you want to achieve something fast and don't have to worry about running out of memory.