How much RAM do you need, should you upgrade it, and will it speed up your PC Welcome to Extreme. Techs comprehensive RAM guide, in which well answer a broad range of questions related to how much system RAM you need these days, whether or not its worth it to upgrade older systems, and whether DDR3 or DDR4 the new main types of system RAM is a better investment option. Its interesting to look back and see how much things have changed over the past twenty years. People have been writing RAM guides for decades, but back when I was learning about computing, much more emphasis was paid to the specific technical implementation of any given RAM standard. Fast Page Mode RAM, EDO RAM, SDRAM, DDR, and RDRAM are just a few of the standards that existed elbow to elbow, and which type of memory your system used often determined if it was worth upgrading. Nowadays, things are simpler. While a few of you may still have DDR2 based equipment from 2. Tandy Deskmate Download' title='Tandy Deskmate Download' />DDR3. Thats the memory standard well focus on if you have DDR2 related questions youre welcome to drop them in the comments. How much RAM do you need How much RAM you need in a system depends on what you intend to do with it, how long you intend to keep it, and whether or not you can upgrade your memory post purchase. This last point is important, as many high end laptops have eliminated user upgradeable RAM in order to reduce system thickness by roughly six nanometers. Adding additional RAM to any laptop generally increases power consumption by a measurable if small amount, but this shouldnt be an issue for most users. Its also better to have a bit too much RAM than too little, as whatever you gain in power savings youll promptly lose to increased disk paging. Apples Mac. Book Air offers 4. GB of RAM, but most of the systems from Dell, HP, and other OEMs start at 8. GB, and I think thats the better sweet spot. Thats not to say you cant get by on 4. GB you absolutely can but 8. GB gives you a bit more breathing room. Tandy Deskmate Download' title='Tandy Deskmate Download' />The Mac. Book Air ushered in the era of soldered DRAM. Everyone followed. Windows 1. 01 1. 4mb boot disk A self contained preconfigured easy to make disk that boots to Windows 1. PC. Take the Win 1. Tandy Technical Faxback documents, circa January 1995. INDEX TO AUTOHOME ALARM SYSTEMS 00002. INDEX TO CELLULAR PHONES 00003. INDEX TO COMPUTER. Xerox 6085 1985 Produced from 1985 to 1989, the Xerox 6085 was the culmination of Xerox innovation in graphical user interfaces, networking and object oriented. Tandy DeskMate 3. Desktop version 3. Screen Shots. Tandy DeskMate is a desktop environment that integrates with a number of useful bundled applications. Theres at least some evidence that modern desktop applications have slowed the rate at which they demand more RAM. From 1. 99. 0 to 2. Photoshops minimum RAM requirement rose from 2. MB to 6. 4MB, a 3. It took another 1. MB in 2. 00. 0 to 2. GB in 2. 01. 6. A lightweight system today can get by with 4. Magic Bullet Looks Keygen Mac Os. GB of RAM. 8. GB should be plenty for current and near term future applications, 1. GB gives you comfortable space for the future, and anything over 1. GB is likely overkill unless you specifically know you need it such as for video editing or audio post production. This holds true for desktops as well as laptops. DDR3 or DDR4 Right now theres plenty of DDR3 systems still being sold, but DDR4 has already begun to replace it on the mass market. If youre building a new system and dont have a specific reason to use DDR3, wed recommend buying hardware thats compatible with DDR4. With that said, if your system does use DDR3, thats not the problem that it used to be. In the old days, a computer stuck on, say, PC1. SDRAM was at an intrinsic performance disadvantage compared with systems that used DDR, particularly at higher clock speeds. Thats less true than it used to be, and it may make sense to upgrade a DDR3 system depending on what you have and when you bought it. The reason to use DDR4 at this point has more to do with long term memory pricing trends and future compatibility than fundamental performance. Well explore current price and the performance question later in this guide. Does faster RAM boost system performance Short answer Sometimes, but not by much. Medium answer It depends on other system components, workload, and whether or not youre using integrated graphics. Longer answer See below. RAM performance is controlled by two metrics Clock speed and access latency. Access latencies tend to fall much more slowly than clock rates as this diagram shows, the memory cell cycle time of PC1. DDR4 2. 13. 3. DDR4 doesnt match DDR3 2. DDR4 4. 26. 6. RAM cycle times at various clock speeds. Conventional wisdom is that RAM latency has become relatively less important in recent years, thanks to a combination of factors. Back when L2 caches were small, memory controllers were off die and clocked at a fraction of CPU speed, and there were no L3 caches, memory latency had a larger impact on overall system performance. Modern CPUs are typically backed by 5. MB of L2 per core, and 1. MB to 2. MB of L3 cache per core. Memory controllers are now integrated on die and run at full processor speed. As a result, RAM latency simply doesnt play as large a part as it once did in determining performance. As for raw memory bandwidth, the same large caches that minimize the impact of RAM latency in most applications also limit the impact of memory bandwidth. Desktop applications are, for the most part, latency sensitive, not bandwidth sensitive. These performance results are from Corsair, but they match extensive testing on the topic. AMD APUs love fast DRAM. Theres one major exception to this rule Integrated graphics performance. Both Intel and AMD integrated graphics see some benefit from higher speed memory, but the gains are particularly large on the AMD side. This has proven true for every APU since at least Trinity, and will likely continue to be accurate for DDR4 based hardware. The advent of HBM2 in APUs will finally throw open the bandwidth floodgates until then, integrated graphics will always be somewhat bandwidth limited. What about high end gaming performance Until recently, I wouldve told you that high speed RAM had very little impact on high end gaming. A recent report from Digital Foundry, however, appeared to show otherwise. Digital Foundrys full review is worth a read they tested a Core i. K with a GTX Titan X at 1. DDR4 and of higher clock speeds. What weve done below is map the gains they saw from overclocking DDR4 from 2. MHz to either 3. 06. MHz or 3. 20. 0MHz. These two clock speeds always delivered the best performance, but some titles showed the greatest gains at 3. MHz and regressed at 3. GHz, while others showed continual improvement. This dataset is limited, but it does point to some general trends. Lelouch Mugen Character more. First, minimum frame rates tend to increase more than average frame rate. Second, the gains are title specific Battlefield 4, Crysis 3, and COD Advanced Warfare all see gains under 1. GTA V, Far Cry 4, and The Witcher 3 are all at or above the 1. Assassins Creed Unity splits the difference, with a 1. The Digital Foundry team claims to see a similar set of results when using faster DDR3 in Fallout 4 and a GTX 9. As this screenshot shows, FO4s minimum frame rate rises dramatically when paired with DDR3 2. DDR3 1. 60. 0. Image by Digital Foundry. Again, however, a caveat is in order. Gamebryo games have always tended to be very friendly to more memory bandwidth much more so than you would otherwise expect. Weve seen this in Skyrim, and were seeing it, apparently, in Fallout 4 as well. Tech. Spot has more on this, and their data shows that Intel chips gain more than AMD does from faster DDR3. This actually makes sense the FX 8. L3 and integrated memory controller are clocked at 2. GHz, and the FX 8. RAM. The non Fallout 4 gains arent huge, considering that were increasing RAM clock by 5. For years, conventional wisdom has been that RAM clock speed is nearly irrelevant to game performance, provided that youve met the minimum threshold for a title. Its possible that were seeing the impact of new game engines or that the GTX Titan X that Digital Foundry used was powerful enough to show an impact, whereas previous video cards were not. The choice of resolution 1. FCAT over FRAPS could also have played a part. One major point to be aware of if you intend to try and run extremely high memory clocks If youre buying a bunch of DDR3 1.