How much RAM needed?

Spiggle

Hi,

I am going to buy a second gen i5 laptop and read this on another thread here:

Look for at least 8gb ram, as 4 just doesn't cut it any more.

Is this correct please?

Thanks in advance,
Spigs

Jamie_Cortez

Entirely depends on what your doing with the laptop.
General day to day browsing internet or watching content from the likes of youtube then 4gb will be plenty.

If your going to be gaming, or using it to design things then shoot for 8gb as long as it has a 64bit version of windows.

The reasoning for this is a little more in depth but today's computers generally function with Dual Channel Ram which means you get better performance by having 2 Ram slots occupied.

Windows 7 just on a clean boot with minimal extras installed typically uses somewhere between 1.2gb-1.8gb of Ram depending on what you have loaded at startup.
The more you open on top the higher this gets the slower stuff happens.
Programs that demand huge amounts of RAM such as games will quickly take you to your 4gb limit the problem is further worsened if you have a dedicated video card as the amount of RAM on this has to be taken into account.

So for example a 32 bit version of windows 7 will see something like the following

Ram = 3GB (even if you have 4)
Dedicated Video Card = 1GB

Total = 4GB

64bit Operating systems remove this hard limit.

But like i say, it really depends what you plan to do with the laptop.

Spiggle

Thanks very much for the reply. I went for an i5 Tosh in the end with only 4GB but it's expandable to 8GB. It won't be used for gaming. I was planning on expanding it straight away but after reading your very helpful and informative reply, I may just give it a go as loaded first.

Thank you for taking the time, much appreciated.

Take care,
Spigs

closed

Probably over 99% of the machines in the world have 4GB or much less, 4GB does cut it easily, unless you have a specific piece of software that could use more. More ram would just be used as a disk cache, you're unlikely to notice any difference.

Spiggle

Thanks for the info closed, much appreciated.

All the best,
Spigs

banger9365

well ive got 6gb triple channel i7 ,
and it do's not use any more than 3 on a good day,it only uses 4gb when video editing and thats turning blu-ray in to a android formate MP4,the program do's use the gpu as well,
so 4 gb will be fine, 8gb will be nice if you use the programs that can use it,

if you want to speed it up 100% go for a SSD ,you can get 250gb ish ones for just over £140 now,and you do not void your warranty by putting them in

Kernel_Sanders

banger9365 wrote: »

and it do's not .......the program do's

I actually thought at first you were referring to dos! Why can't you just write does, like every other person in the English speaking world?