i recently upgraded from 16 to 32 GB of ram because of work and honestly its rare that gaming on its own uses more than maybe 14 gb of ram on average, i only noticed higher usage on Warzone and God of War. Other than that probably only city builders and strategy games use a ton of memory. On the other hand i work with giant photoshop files and half the time even 32 gb of ram isnt enough for that lol

going to 32gb was game changing for me, no more lagging when multitasking and editing. really depends on what you use the system for but it solved all my issues with a slower system

I got so tired of having to close my browser and other background processes when gaming on 8gb RAM that i went straight to 32gb. It actually made a huge difference for performance in some games like quake champions. 16gb would have probably been enough but using a PC with 8gb RAM was so annoying that I wanted to make sure i never have too little RAM again in the near future.

Endurance of SSDs is for almost 10 years high enough, that there is no reason to try to ''save it''. No need to turn off page file, or any other bs. Just plug n play. Good video except that myth, it was true with first SSDs, not anymore.

Dual rank is what made the difference not going from 16gb to 32gb.

you need to account for other types of games, especially ones that are cpu dominant. 32 GB makes a huge difference in milsim games like squad, HLL etc and 4x strategy games like Civ6.

It would be interesting to see this comparison in 2023 with all the games coming out requiring a minimum of 16 GB ram, with some of them using up even more than that.

I used to have 2-3 minutes of loadings on Fallout 4... on HDD... After I moved it to an SSD and had the pagefile on another SSD, the game loaded in a few seconds... that's quality of life upgrade!

in most applications personally, i actually do feel like if you have an intense game with some applications in the background 16 is enough- that being said i have 32 and if i have a browser/game/discord/etc open i do tend to max 16 or get close, and if its my minecraft server with around 400 mods it maxes extremely fast. my friend with 16 has crashed a few times due to running out of memory on that, but thats just how it is with intense modding

Some programs use page files regardless of whether there’s adequate RAM space available. The reasons for doing so probably varies a lot, but this is likely why several games wouldn’t run without a page file. Certain functions are likely configured to use a page file specifically instead of RAM.

As someone who has 128gb and has seen that 8gb is the lowest you can go with DDR5. 32gb of ram is most likely gonna become the 16gb for programs soon.

Man, I came across your content today. Crazy good stuff, love it! Thank you

I feel like we are slowly gravitating towards 32 being the standard. In my case i jumped from a 8gb laptop to a 32gb desktop and i can tell you its a life saver for multitasking while having two monitors.

Yeah there's not much difference. And the small differences there were I think come down to single rank vs dual rank. Hardware unboxed showed this in their testing as well. 16GB it is, thanks for the video!

I love that you included the 1% lows and put everything in an easy to read bar chart. Most people just put numbers up which is hard to interpret

The part of page files degrading drive performance is only a thing for HDDs and even that too over multiple years of use. For SSDs it might decrease performance by 1% over like 5 years, which isn't noticeable at all.

The real impact from adding RAM is really around latency. The review was pretty good at talking about the issues around memory management and paging, but one thing that's rarely mentioned is that OS behavior around page files has changed over the last 30 years. Back so many years, page file usage was so costly that it would largely not be used until memory was almost consumed, and this is where the common gaming dogma of "if it fits in memory, you don't need more of it" comes from. About 20 or so years ago, paging algorithms began to change. With faster HDDs and more RAM hungry (less efficiently written) programs operating systems started to run into a problem where by the time your RAM was consumed, you were backed into a corner where any further memory requests would begin seriously eroding system performance, which made it pretty hard to get out of a heavy paging condition because there was little real memory left for the system to support the actions of the user. As a result, pre-paged frames became common in OS kernels, and usually configurable such as through the Linux /proc filesystem. In order to preserve performance, once the system hit a RAM consumption threshold, the kernel would begin paging out the frames of memory that it deemed less recently accessed and not actively used. The idea being that doing this during low system consumption periods would allow for more memory use before the page file became the sole source of new memory frame creation. In many common Linux distros, the default was about 60%, but the actual threshold would often vary around the 50% mark or so in different flavors of various operating systems like Windows. Around the same time, OS creators began providing cache services in RAM for file access and other duties. That extra RAM the program's not using? The system is using that as a file cache for faster return read/writes. This is likely where some of the better lows performance is coming from for the testing. By reducing the amount of times the game needs to reach back to slower storage for file data, the impact to latency from the file call is reduced. File caches are commonly assumed to be empty memory, but in actual testing this is not entirely true, especially in the new era of OS memory management where dynamic memory allocation is the trend. What happens is that most of it can be purged from real memory, but open files still need to remain in memory, and that's variable. And now instead of paging at hard levels, OS memory management layers mark pages as possible to page to disk, which blurs the line between what is likely to be paged and not before all RAM is consumed. The end result is that the low end performance impact from memory and paging is difficult to ascertain for certain, since concepts like having a bigger file cache and having less paging due to a lower percentage of the memory being used come into effect when running into parts of games that maybe need to rotate data in memory or need to load new assets. At the same time, having everything in memory can potentially crowd out new information, incurring a cost in ejecting and reorganizing pages through purges rather than simply rewiring the page memory map, which in some games may be what's causing more latency hits with the page file off. So what does this all come down to? Well, if you just want to buy enough to be able to load the game, then the baseline requirements are adequate and you may not even notice much of a difference with faster storage if you're not sensitive to latency (or the game/workload in question doesn't incur a hit to loading new assets or does so through loading screens)... but if you're sensitive to lower end latency and stutter, more RAM is better even if you're not seeing the total numbers for your game load into RAM, if only to further reduce file loading latency and reduce page misses. Unfortunately, latency and user experience is hard to measure and doesn't show through in average FPS testing, so I think we have a lot of inappropriate testing out there relating to measuring the actual impact of more RAM on gaming experience, but it's not a big deal because many people simply don't care that much about these lower-end, less frequent latency hits. (I personally do, and I also do programming and system architecture/testing work... so I spring for the faster, larger RAM segments.) As far as having a page file is concerned, it's safe to not have one if you have a significant excess of memory, but having a small page file may be the ideal compromise in many circumstances.

my overall experience whether gaming or productivity improved significantly when i upgraded from 16gb of ram to 32gb.

Subbed for the quality of content and image crispiness. Like it even more when my 8GB GPU is sprinting frickin hard on 1440p Very High setting!

Yes! I was hitting 15gb just playing squad with some apps in the background. My 32gb ram upgrade gave a night and day difference

Nice testing. I thought you wouldn't think about the pagefiling. When I had 3 drives, id use one for booting (ssd), one for pictures and pagefile, and one for games. Had to remove the pictures one, pagefile went to the games drive and now games take longer to load. I have 16gb btw, will be upgrading soon.

I went from 16 to 32 bc prices were so good and in some early access titles I got over 20gb of usage at 1440p, i5 11400 and rtx 3050, and in far cry 5 I got around 17gb, so extra ram is definitely nice to have and since ddr4 is so cheap rn if you have a ddr4 system I see no reason not to go up to 32gb

Thanks for this very informative video. Keep up the great work!

Nice editing man I was surprised you didn't have like 200k subscribers. Subbed

If you disable the Page File that may cause some performance and stability issues, however you can improve the PF performance by giving it a fixed size of 16384 MB (16GB), also make sure the PF is using the fastest SSD you have.

I just built an overkill pc lol 4090 13900k and 64gb vengeance ram

Extra Ram makes a huge difference. I was always watching flight sim videos when they would fly with super smooth graphics and now watching those videos I notices stutters every now and then but I hardly get any. I get 50-60 fps in high density areas and 30-45 in payware aircraft . Feels good man.

It also matters how you distribute the RAM. i.e. if you have 2x8GB and then add further 2x8, even if the app will not use above 16GB there will be an increase in perfromance as AMD has been tested extensively and 4 modules provide better perrformance (dual ranks). So an absolutely true test of 32GB vs 16GB would be to use 2x8GB and 2x16GB I think. The difference can be as much as 5-15% simply by going from 2 modules to 4 modules. Or maybe you did exactly that and used 2x16GB and sorry if I did not pay proper attention then. Also: how about adding a RAMDRIVE, assign a drive letter and set a page file on it? Not saying to go to 64GB but if money is not an issue...

On a somewhat related note, I bought a new kit of 32gb 3600 MHZ and was disappointed when it wasnt doing much more than 16... six months later poking around in the BIOS i noticed I never enabled XMP. Got an additional 20-30 fps in games and over 100 fps in menus and such

Happy Holidays! Love your vids and just wanted to say thanks!

For sure upgrading from 16 to 32 is the best upgrade possible because its cheap when compared with the others, and actually make a lot of difference, at least i noticed

I used to turn off page file back in the day when 8GB was the optimal and I had 16GB to save a little bit of storage, I still have 16GB today but now all I can do is reduce the size of the file to half of the default but even so occasionally I still get a crash because of low memory though very rarely.

Had switched to 32gb back in 2015, 64gb in 2020, and now using 128gb; still saw usability increase over 32gb and 64gb. Can leave browsers, game and software launchers, and virtual machines open without an issue. Having used various amounts of ram and storage i've adopted the mindset of "speed is great but capacity is best." Windows 10/11 as a whole only give the impression it uses less ram thanks to memory compression; when one gives their build more ram there is more room for the operating system to "breathe." Unfortunately demonstrating the overall smoothness and responsiveness of an operating system as a whole doesn't translate well into video; it is something that should be experienced. I would never turn off the page file, the amount of random glitches and bugs is not worth the headaches of troubleshooting. Having used ssds with over 70,000 hours of uptime and many TBs of writes; its well worth leaving on for peace of mind. Ensure you maintain backups of your important files whenever possible. For those still on 16gb and less; consider looking for a deal on 32gb kits these days, being able to leave more things open without caring is a quality of life enhancement when using your computer. A reminder that, "Life is good but it could be better."

I'm glad you mentioned Escape From Tarkov because that game truly showed a large boost in performance with 32Gb of RAM. That game I feel should be included in more benchmarks because it is not only not optimized well, but it also can respond better to CPU or RAM changes in a much more marked way that some other games. It's a classic example of "brute forcing" performance when there is typically an abundance of power or engine limitations found in other games. Great video btw! Would love to see some benchmarks with two NVME SSD's in RAID 0 to see if the CPU overhead outweighs the raw speed of that config?

the only reason i went to 64 gig was so i could create a RAM Cache using a 15 sec write delay and prefetch of data on boot, is has saved about 65% of my average write defer. writing to ssd/ m.2 is the most limiting factor to there life spans and its nice having ssd read speeds of 25 gigabytes a second instead of the 7gig on my gen 4 drives :)

Rust uses so much ram it’s insane. I have 16gigs and my ram usage is at 14-15 while playing rust (with closing background apps)

I just went to 64GB in all my rigs since DDR5 and DDR4 is so cheap now in 2023.

If you're thinking of upgrading, I think it's fine if you're still on 16GB, new builds however, I'd go with 32GB.

Not sure what SSD you are using but it would be cool to see the effects of a fast nvme gen 4 drive to a sata ssd has with the PF and performance. Since windows games seem to rely on the PF a good bit it would be cool to see the impact of a faster drive with the PF and of it may have on overall performance bump potentially with the 1% lows like we saw when the PF were turned off.

I believe CIV 6 or Galactic Civ 3 would benefit greatly from having 32 GB of memory if you choose the giant playing map options. You should have chosen some games that say they require 32GB for certain options to actually see if it made a difference / worked/ etc... In that sense this video failed, and I was hoping you would cover that and or wondering if an SSD page file was fast enough...

Very minor inconvenience but the only issue with my current ram configuration (16gb) is that while running games other applications can be a lot choppier, not unusable but choppier. I plan on running more monitors in the future so the extra ram would help a lot with that

Excellent video, thank you for the insights!

Great, video! Thanks for the information

I had an 8GB stick (single channel), Valorant would run in between 90-130fps at (960p low settings) with only discord running on the background. I added one more 8GB stick and made it dual channel, now Valorant runs at around 200 fps at (1080p medium settings) with discord, spotify and MS Edge running on the background :)

If you do another one in the future, please put Escape from Tarkov in the list, it really eats a lot of RAM and i wonder how much 32GB would benefit there

I recently upgraded from 16 GB to 32 GB of RAM. Using Unreal Engine 5 and other software simultaneously not only slowed down my PC but also caused crashes. This upgrade has made a significant difference in Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) and has had a slight impact on various strategy games.

Something i've noticed is that games feel alot smoother. The 0.1% and the 1% lows are much better. Modern warfare uses 16gb for me. and feels great!

So you chose the first one ! Great video btw. I think 16GB is still enough, but taking 32GB in a new higher end pc will be more relevant in the next years.

dual rank is better than single rank most of the 2x16 ram kits are dual rank and most of the 2x8 kits are single rank so if you install another 2x8 ram kit it will be dual rank I have ryzen 5600x rtx 3080 pc when I ran 2x8 ram GPU usage was jumping around between 75 to 95 so my fps were very inconsistent so I installed another 2x8 ram kit now my GPU usage is between 95 to 98 through out the game

Really nice and helpful... Thanks!

Upgraded to 32GB from 16GB of RAM completely removed the stuttering issue with Hogwart's Legacy. This game uses more than 18GB of RAM using high textures. Crazy.

I just upgraded to 32, because i saw how cheap ram has become over the last years. Basically only paid 40€ for the upgrade as i was able to sell my old 16gb kit. I have no doubt that very soon games will see actual improvements with 32gb. Hogwarts Legacy for one can use up to 26gb. But as far as i have heard thats due to poor optimization.

You can not run without pagefile, you want to at least set a maximum allocation ( set aside for incase needed ) to pagefile as with auto Windows will set the max to double the amount of system ram and not only that will do the same to every set drive space. Minimum for the max that apps will even start with is like 4gb, having 32gb ram and auto set pagefile is 64gb pagefile + 64gb on the next drive and the next ( my case would be 256gb total pagefile ) where likely only 2gb might get used. But there are processes that run only in pagefile ' paged pool '. I am running 32gb system ram and the OS on an HDD, the pagefile set to: 16MB - 4000MB, under the Memory tab of Task Manager 1gb is used for Paged Pool even with 10gb/32gb used ram. This has been a thing for Windows for a couple decades now.

Hey! Thanks so much for this video!

you need more people to subscribe this all i needed to know and more. perfect video please keep up the good work.

16gb is now the "minimum" for 2024. Oh how far times have changed.

You've tested only on Potato popular games that does not rely on heavy hardware to play, thus not making a great difference.

When I run the game only on my 16gb PC it runs fine, but as I try to play game with chrome tabs open simultaneously, I immediately see lag and fps drop in games.. so I think its a calling that I need 32gb now

BROTHER, YOU ARE THE BEST!!! You oooh really helped me!! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

I went from 16gb to 48gb because most of the time I have stuff running in the background. I would hit 15gb regularly and had problems with apps hanging in the background due to low memory. After upgrading I average about 18gb usage playing cyberpunk.

You didn't control for rank at all. I appreciate you acknowledged this point during your review, but then did nothing to control it during testing. Most motherboards have the options to run DR kits as SR. Or buy DR 2x8GB kits. Most of the performance differences here are likely due to SR vs DR. Especially on AMD systems.

Bought additional 16 GB of Ram few days ago. New Tarkov Wipe hitting hard and the game take 14 of my 16 GB and windows takes the last 2 for the System so i just bought it. Damn Ram got really cheap, i paid 75€ back in the day for my 16 GB and now i spent 42€. I also enjoy editing my Gameclips and do Intros( Cinema 4d and After Effects) so 32 GB will help out a ton for larger Preview. Anyway, helpful Video :) Thank you and happy new year @all.

I got 32 gb and I'm glad I did. I just bought it cause why not? And after having had 32 gb for around 8 months, I've gone over 16 gb in use many, many times. I've seen it reach up to probably 25 gb in use at once, just having a game open and some browser tabs. 16 is probably good for gaming but if there's anything at all in the background, 16 might just not be enough. And I love to have a video or something playing on my second monitor while playing a game.

Recently upgraded to i9-12900k and 64gb of ddr5 it is insane the performance boost. Ram is an amazing thing especially for multi monitor setups.

16gb is not enough anymore. I was playing diablo 4 and for the first time, I couldn't open more than 1 tab in my browser because I was lacking ram space. If you already invested in a good gpu and cpu, you expect your PC to run through things without a problem and encountering what I just said wont feel good.

Something I think you and everyone is forgetting, what happens when the next "GOT TO HAVE" comes out and you need 24 gigs of ram to run it well. You go to guy more ram and that ram you didnt buy 2 years ago flat isn't there anymore, I run alot of stuff in the backround and do some video editing and capture, I am now running 64 gigs.

I like to future proof my builds when it comes to RAM since it’s generally cheap anyway. My PC from 2014 has 16GB of RAM. So the next one I build will have 32gb or more

For someone like me who plays VR, upgrading to 32gb is a good idea since many VR titles (like VRChat) are very memory intensive and also require VR launchers to be open which are also heavy on the memory. I would say if you already had 16gb than that's all you really need but if you're planning on buy a new computer then spending a little more on that extra ram isn't a bad idea.

A good example of needing extra ram is minecraft Java, which for some reason, uses up 24gb of ram on my pc. A friend of mine with a Acer nitro 5 with 8gb of ram actually has his pc crash often due to minecraft hogging up ram. You do need to allocate more ram to minecraft for it to use that much though, as its allocation is set to 2gb by default.

32gb gave me peace of mind and I dont have to worry about discord and chrome open when gaming. Task manager rarely gets open anymore

the video quality is through the roof that its a crime that he doesnt have 1mil subs

32GB for MS Flight Simulator is a must.

i'd say if you will use your pc for gaming then 16gb is enough and 32gb is a waste but if you want to stream then 32gb is a very good choice

I have 32 GB of RAM. I've noticed that when gaming my computer ALMOST uses over 16 gigs of RAM. So if I left more stuff in the background or the game ate up more RAM it would probably want more.

So essentially there isn't too much of a performance difference but sometimes there is, the main benefit is a longer SSD lifespan. I'd say longer SSD lifespan is reason enough to run 32gb over 16gb. 32GB is around 140$CAD right now which is close to the price of a decent SSD (100-200$)

Really should have been both single rank kits to see apples to apples. Gains are so small anyway you can't trust a SR vs DR test when you are trying to find benefits of 16gb vs 32gb. Would have been best to do 2x16gb DR and 4x8gb SR of the exact same spec and timings. Or 2x8gb SR vs 2x16gb SR.

I have an older gtx950 (4GB GDDR5) and had 8 gigs of ram. People were like your old gpu will never utilise 16 gigs. I used to play cod, pubg, forza. I mention these three games specifically as my fps almost doubled in each of these 3 when I installed another stick of 8gb ram. Dual channel does help but I also see the ram usage while gaming reach 70-80%. So I’d say yah if you have an rtx card, you’ll want to have at least 32 gigs dual channel.

That was great. Thank you.

I used to play warzone 1 with 16Gb but when i needed to open the browser or something it was a pain... I wanted to increase the RAM up to 32Gb but honestly i don't use that much. 24 is a reasonable amount of memory if you don't feel weird having a odd number of RAM sticks. But if you do, and rgb looks weird too, go for 4x8Gb or 2x16Gb

I have too much RAM, 64gb, it just makes the whole system smoother though. I never have to decompress any cached data and I don't notice the difference between loading games from a slower or faster SSD The main difference that I noticed is that (with my beefy CPU) I can watch a stream, do a discord call, have a game on hold in the background (like Elite Dangerous) and play a second game with my friends (like the division 2)

I found the jump to 32 just makes your pc easier to manage. You don't need to make sure nothing at all is using ram and in some games (mostly poorly optimized stuff like 7 days to die) the extra ram is hugely helpful for minimizing stuttering. For the difference in price 16Gigs doesn't really make sense anymore.

I noticed no performance uplift going from 16gb of 2666MT/s to 32gb of 3600MT/s CL16 but it's way better for multitude of chrome tabs, matlab etc. and even if I happen to start up a game I don't have to reload any of the background tasks or tabs or pages.

I went from 16gb to 32gb because some of the VR games I played were too close to using all my RAM. Safe to say its worth the upgrade

You need to test 2x8 vs2x16 Dual channel is what makes the difference. Unless your ram is actually too little testing how much benefit more ram brings is very hard, as it just tandomly makes it less responsive, hard to measure in traditional benchmarks

I'm at 32GB and I often find my RAM usage close to 50%. I tab out of games to do stuff, open multiple browser tabs, some other apps etc. Sure 16 gigs would do, but if all I wanted was to game, I'd get a console for less than a motherboard price.

Quality footage, thanks for your effort. It's actually weird, that you didn't benefit more from the dual rank DIMMs because latency is pretty much Zen's steriod or its achilles heel depending on the view point and dual rank should lower latency significantly. That you didn't really benefit from the extra 16GB when just gaming is kinda given. Yeah, the memory management can be less aggressive which may result in a little more headroom for the CPU but after all modern CPUs are such beasts that that's nothing to worry about, that's like 'cleaning your regisitry' in hopes of a faster system... Not going to happend for anything more than a Athlon X2 or Pentium 4.

I switched to 32 GB because I disable pagefile. Running with 16GB caused DeusEX crash randomly, updated to 32GB - all running good. but now I bought Ryzen 7700X and 32GB is a minimum DDR5 anyway...

I had some memory issues with my 16GB of RAM, but I was able to upgrade to 32GB and everything ran great! When I still had 16GB, GTA V would occasionally crash and gave me a memory error. Ever since I upgraded to 32GB, no crashes whatsoever. I would encourage people to upgrade to 32GB if they can, because not only are you going to avoid memory issues, but you are also future proofing your PC. Edit: I think it’s a good time to rephrase myself with the “memory issues” I had before upgrading to 32GB of ram. To start off, my 16GB of ram is fine. The ONLY time I would run into a memory issue is when large background applications are running, like “News and Interests” (which can eat up a lot of memory) while playing a game like GTA V (I play at 1440p high settings). Even then, I didn’t run into issues right off the bat. The reason I upgraded to 32GB is not because my 16GB is bad, nor is it faulty. It’s because I wanted to “future proof” my PC when I build myself a new one in the next few months. I haven’t ran into any issues ever since upgrading to 32GB. After reading my original comment, I can understand why people were telling me my memory was faulty, but I made it sound worse than it actually was. I reinstalled the 16GB and played a couple of games for an hour to see if I ran into any problems and I didn’t run into one. Sorry about the long edit, but I hope I cleared everything up.

@ Iceberg Tech There is a simple point, why fps go down without a pagefile. The integrated memory compression of windows will try to compress the stored data in the memory, which causes extra cpu-overhead. And i know this video is a year old, but i got it displayed today, i enjoy your content mostly 🙂

when it comes to gaming the game you are playing definitely matters... when playing a game with many background simulations its a huge difference in performance

For gaming alone, I find it almost impossible to go beyond 12gb of ram. For productivity, as a hobby, I've also never used more than 10gb of ram. 8gb is definitely too little, 16gb is more than enough for gaming and casual productivity (photoshop, blender, game dev, just not at a professional level where you'd handle gigantic files).

So you tested single rank vs. dual rank, and then pretended you were testing capacity. Why? You lie about it?

Do NOT turn off paging. Windows uses this quite a bit. It's not "using the storage drive like RAM" like some people think. It's on by default for a very good reason.

I've noticed 3600MHz 32GB kits are getting pretty cheap now. Almost the same price as my 3200MHz 16GB kit that I bought in 2020!

Is this with no background apps? Cause realistically a lot of people game with discord, chrome, and a lot more

I have 32GB, but even very modern AAA games only put total system RAM use at around 14GB max. I have to use some type of creative app to make use of all 32GB.

That's why Im always on 64gb of ram for almost 10 years back. Sometimes had idea to go for 128 but no need. Maybe in 2 years

I hit full memory at 16GB while using a second monitor for Chrome and streaming stuff while playing on primary, now I'm going up to 32GB because I'll definitely have to in the coming couple years so might as well.

Here before 8K, here’s to 80K and beyond! Great quality content (one video but still).

32GB of ddr4 3200 cl 16 just cost me $58 for a 2x16 kit. Back in the day a 2x4 kit of slower ram was $175. With the way ram prices have come down (for the time being) 32 gigs for 58 rockets seems like a no brainer for less cost than a half a tank of gas.