Would it be worth it to add more ram?

Running WoW and having multiple browser tabs open, listening to music, etc., I usually hang in the neighborhood of using roughly 70% of my ram, give or take a few points. I have 16GB of DDR4. Would it be worth it to try and buy another 16 gigs?

Short answer: no.

I made the same upgrade myself a little while back. Several high and low intensity programs all at once - multiple video transcoding processes, a game, browsers, tools, and so forth - seemed like the perfect situation for it. All its done is made the garbage collection processes built into the OS (Windows) less aggressive as they don’t need to be as active any more. Actual performance hasn’t noticeably changed either for the better or worse, and typical memory actually in use still rarely reaches 16GB.

Having more than 16GB is only really beneficial on a system which hosts multiple virtual machines (simply to allow them more uncontested memory access) or deals with absolutely massive amounts of data which cannot reasonably be streamed on demand - such as large scale (either in size, quantity, or both) image manipulation. For anyone else all it does is offer bragging rights and maybe, maybe make the program you just closed load back up a little faster due to caching.

NB If you’re thinking it might let you disable Virtual Memory on a Windows machine, don’t. There’s no appreciable performance gains to be had by doing so, and a lot of completely avoidable issues which it can (and will) introduce.

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I’ll just pass on adding more ram then since, according to all you’ve said, don’t feel very necessary. Thanks for replying.

I figure I’ll throw in a second perspective on the matter, going through memory upgrades, based on my own experiences.

If you’re only hanging at 70%, give or take, it’s true that adding more won’t be much of an improvement at that point. I would only suggest it if you are already tapping into your virtual memory/swap file.

I’ve made the move to upgrade to 64GB just when the Ryzen 3000 was released, basing my decision on my gradually changing computer habits over ~15 years, going 8 → 16 → 32 → 64.

Each time I made the next “tier” upgrade, it was because I was frequently using my swap file, sometimes ballooning almost to whatever amount of physical RAM I had at that point, and adding more physical memory improved my performance.

Keep in mind though, I’m a rare case, where my RAM usage is the result of me being a heavy multitasker - doing everything you do in addition to running the occasional VM, and not doing any kind of photo or video editing. Then I have games like Flight Sim 2020 where it is recommended to have 32GB.

As of now, I only average 40-50GB typical usage.

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That’s a bit over my level of tech knowledge, so I have no idea about that. I only know how to check the memory usage percentage with task manager.

Dear lord. :no_mouth:

That’s pretty much what I use as well. It is also how often I see my CPU utilization and whether upgrading that is needed.

You’ll only touch those if your system runs out of RAM; if you’re maxing out at 70% you wouldn’t be touching them. The swap/page files are files (duh) located on your drive that your system can use in place of RAM if necessary. They’re slower than RAM but it’ll keep things from crashing (at least until you run out of space in those too).

WoW uses about 4GB of RAM by itself. 32 is the new 16.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh… as somebody who did started out with 32 GB of DDR4 3200mhz of ram and moved up to 64gb awhile ago, depends on how many tabs you need to keep open at all times, though 16gb should be enough for like 10 or such. I even opened 40 tabs in Mozilla and it only costed me 3-4gb just now.

It still benefits to have 32gb, given the future and how rapidly were approaching to 16GB for high end gaming and later on mid tier gaming.

My WoW uses about 4-5GB of ram. Essentially 7% for me. :stuck_out_tongue:

I only upgraded to 32GB because Rust was using 12GBs of RAM when I was playing it.

The amount of RAM everyone is expected to have doubles every 3-5 years or so.