I've only got 4gb of DDR3 1600 and it's just not enough. It does the job for my gaming needs but I do lots of video editing and Photoshopping so there's quite a bit of strain. I tend to have at least 15+ tabs open in chrome, which is always open. I'll buy more RAM when I have the money, heatsink decided to crap out on me by melting a bit.

Well I have 8 gb (2x4gb) DDR 3. Haven't really noticed any problems but I also haven't run resource monitor while gaming either. I'll probably add 8 more gigs in a few months. But right now I dont notice anything

I have 4 gigs right now but I bought 8 gigs of RAM. Corsair Vengeance. Will be putting it in soon. I'm the type of person who can literally have up to 70 tabs open at the end of the day, as I use Firefox's tab groups, I'm also the person who would run a game at the same time as firefox has all those tabs running, as I do alt-tab often. I might have Visual Studio 2010 running as well. Steam, MSN are always on.

yep.

Depends on the type of ram & what new innovations the ram brings to the table on efficiency & performance.

Like xdr dram,mobile xdr dram & xdr 2 dram bring to the table...

http://www.rambus.com/us/te...

Currently running 6GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 OC to 1866. It never limits out under gaming it might hit 3GB MIGHT. However i think im just gonna get a next 6GB kit just to be safe. I idle at around 15GB.

So i'd say 6 is perfect but 12 is the sweetspot.

No more than 6gb of RAM. I had 4gb and updated to 6gb but it made no major difference.

Guys there is a hack on Windows to increase your memory so it exceeds Windows 32bit limitation.

All you need to do is drop in a file that is found on Windows 64bit OSs or Windows Server OSs

Its basically like a 38bit extension.

I have 8GB DDR2 1066MHz.
I've disabled page files because they slow your system down.
I've got rid of services that I know I'll never use.
I've disabled many items from the start-up including services.

Also I recommend Ccleaner and Defraggler.

Plus I disable Hibernation, in cmd type "powercfg -h off"
Plus I disable Restore points, since I clone my disks.

Its just basic home clearing if you like. Have not done a clean install since Windows 7 release on my RIG.
Also I have an SSD so that helps :)

I had 6GB of ram in my last rig , but I only have 4GB now. The last rig was much slower in specs , but with that much ram it ran much smoother. I am upgrading to 8GB ram as soon as I can.

I saw one guy boasting on N4G that he was getting 16GB ram for gaming and when I said it was a waste some people disagreed with me.

You NEED 4gb, but most WANT 8gb. Most of the people claiming they "need" more then 4 are just lazy. I was the same way, 20 firefox windows open, a paused movie in media player that's minimized, with 2 games running, one in a lobby waiting for my teammates to show up while I'm in the single player mode of another.

Multitasking is great, but in the long run its better to train YOURSELF to be more efficient. Bookmark the 1-2 pages you want to look at later and close all 20 of those firefox windows. I have 8 gb in this machine, but I've learned to kept it under 3 most of the time, and I'm a heavy computer user.

That being said, there's certainly nothing wrong with getting more, but 12 and 16 is a waste right now for "gaming." Admittedly a small waste considering the price of ram currently, but many people are getting huge amounts for no practical reason.
I fairly recent toms article showed no improvement between 8,12,and 16gb on gaming performance, so unless you're just a multitasking freak (which again,isn't really gaming), you should balance the system and look at things like ssd's.

Oh come on guys. I have 2GB of PC6400 and I never EVER manage to max that out. No matter what I do. I have tons of tabs open, and I multitask like a mother effer. Chrome with 15 tabs open is at 900MB of RAM. Gaming never reaches over 1.8GB. Nothing I ever do maxes out the RAM. 6GB is a pleasure. Anything over is over kill right now.

my pc cofig is ,win7 with 512mb ddr2 ram .i can run maximum 2 program simuntaneosly .i use firefox4 for multi tab browsing.chrome for single tab browsing .chrome sucks at multi tabing bcz it takes heavy load at MTing.when i had 1gb ram,i played hola 1 with out any stuck.if i get 2gb ram.i will be extreamly happy

i have 16gb ddr3 1600 windows 7 ultimate i have only ever used up to 9gb of ram at a time right now im only using 2.80 gb with steam,fire fox and winamp opened up.

so i believe 12gb should be good enough but in the next 3 or 4 years you never know 16gb could become the norm.

These people are morons.

"We’ve come a long way from the days when gamers struggled to run Doom in DOS with 4 megs of RAM"

Having 4 megs of ram in DOS means nothing, as you had to have at least 628Kb for it to start up, 640Kb was the max you could have to get stuff started under DOS, Doom didn't even need 4meg of ram as it'd run on 512kb fine.

It was the CPU back then that mattered.

They complain about the system memory but running the games will have nothing to do with the system memory but the GFX card ram.

Photo shop image would have been over 200megs of ram uncompressed in system memory that's why it doesn't work on teh 1 gig system as the WinXP uses up 1gig of ram for itself, Win Vista and Win7 use up 2 gig of ram alone but Win7 also use up your GFX card ram as well.

This is obviously an article made by someone who can't afford more then 2 or 3 GB.

If you can get 8 GB, or even 16GB, why not, you won't have to upgrade for a very long time.

most of this 8+gb ram is a waste