Hot take: in 2024, 8GB of memory is enough for non-enthusiasts

[Zodiark1593]

9 hours ago, starsmine said:

With linux sure, not with windows. And I would never ask a non enthusiast to use linux. 

Its not "enthusiasts" that use ram-heavy applications. 8gb with the modern sandboxing of applications (and in the future, ALL applications) page file is the most unpleasant experience, and SSDs do not fix it.

Asking a non enthusiast to baby sit their ram usage on 8gb is a non starter.

There is also a major thing that most cheap laptops use IGPs, aka thats 2-4gigs of ram just gone from use. So even 12GB laptops with IGPs constantly page file. Arguing 12GB as a good starting point doesnt hold water, thats only valid if the computer uses a dgpu. An IGPU laptop/desktop needs 16GB minimum to not regularly hit page file, something intel is now forcing going forward with all new meteor lake laptops.

iGPUs only take up as much memory, as the application requires if a game typically only needs 1 GB of VRAM, it’s only that amount that will be used (in addition to what the game requires to begin with). Rendering just the desktop, certainly much less. 
 

Having said that, as iGPUs become fast enough for gamers to actually want to use, having a lot of system memory will be of greater relevance. And high resolution textures are a cheap way of squeezing as much visual fidelity as you can from an iGPU. 

[Kisai]

19 hours ago, seanondemand said:

 

8 GB of memory is enough for daily use, which for most normal people (that is, non LTT forum readers), can handle all the everyday things they need to do. 

No, it isn't. There are three tabs in firefox and chrome. Steam and Epic sit there and use as much memory as Chrome does.

 

 

 

If you think 8GB is enough, then you are not using it for gaming, unless you consider web-based games "gaming" and not steam/epic.

 

Sure, there are games that might be fine, but if you're actively trying to play something that isn't made in something like gamemaker or came out 10 years ago, you're in for a rough time.

 

Notice that without any games running, just the usual day-to-day crap I have running, takes 30GB.

 

I'm not you. You're not me. If you think 8GB is enough, then you clearly aren't using the laptop in any way that would be noticed, or penalized. SSD's do not have infinite wear cycles. Back before SSD's, you would notice you didn't have enough RAM because the physical hard drive would be constantly chattering, draining away battery life. SSD's have pretty much saved laptops from their too-small RAM sizes.

 

 

[Stahlmann]

I recently switched from 32GB to a temporary 16GB kit for a gaming PC and i was actually surprised how easy it is to fill it up. So for general office use, 8GB can probably work, but for gaming 16GB has gone from "recommended" to "minimum".

[WhitetailAni]

20 hours ago, 8tg said:

Meanwhile I have 64gb of ram and windows takes that as “welp, better cache all this useless shit in 12gb of it at idle”

Well, unused RAM is wasted RAM... given that it isn't doing anything else at the time, why not use it?

 

I routinely see my RAM usage at like 25/64GB on W10 which is just fine because the applications I have open are using maybe 8 out of that 25. That's ~56GB doing nothing, so Windows is taking advantage of that to cache stuff that would otherwise be on disk (and be much slower to access).

[Monkey Dust]

I think it depends a lot on your browsing habits. 30 tabs open at all times (guilty)? You could run 8GB very close to the wire. If you're using an application that isn't well optimized for RAM usage, 8GB could easily prove to not be enough.

 

If you have old tech that you can't, or don't want to, upgrade, 8GB may not seem like an unreasonable limitation. But I wouldn't buy a new PC/Mac with less than 12GB.

 

My hot take. If you just need a laptop for browsing, word processing and note-taking, get a tablet with a keyboard case. Does everything you need with less size, weight and power consumption.

[Lurking]

Rule of thumb is to add RAM if 75% are used. That leaves 6GB and indicates a very low level of use, or heavy SSD caching 

 

Maybe OP's computer has other bottlenecks anyway. But before suggesting such low level PC is enough, try a modern computer and see the difference. If you never use a faster computer, you don't know how slow yours is.

[8tg]

2 hours ago, WhitetailAni said:

Well, unused RAM is wasted RAM.

I have never liked this counter argument to wasteful memory allocation. It’s not that I need it, it’s that I don’t like it not telling me what it’s doing with it, and not being able to minimize it. I don’t care if an os uses my ram if it’s actually doing something with it. But windows tends to just do whatever it feels like and doesn’t tell you what it’s doing. Stop using my ram.

its just as bad with like the page file and hiberfile.sys even with paging and hibernation disabled where it’ll eat some predetermined amount of space relative to your drive size and not actually tell you its doing this. So one day you run windirstat to discover your windows install folder is 113gb because you have a 40gb hiberfile.sys for a feature you never use.

 

Ah but it’s unused space so it doesn’t matter. I don’t care, why was it even doing that. RAM in windows is the same way, tell me what you’re doing and let me decide if it’s ok for you to idle at 12gb of ram. I doubt it will be, but stop hiding it regardless.

[Vishera]

8GB is enough for most games if your OS is completely debloated.

 

22 hours ago, Levent said:

Hot take 4gb of ram is enough for those.

22 hours ago, seanondemand said:

I’ve been using it for a couple weeks now for school stuff, dozens of tabs in Brave, MS Office, and cloud gaming on Game Pass, so here’s my take:

Right now i am on my Windows 2000 machine and 1GB of RAM is enough for those tasks (Modern versions of Windows are extremely bloated):

[starsmine]

1 hour ago, 8tg said:

I have never liked this counter argument to wasteful memory allocation. It’s not that I need it, it’s that I don’t like it not telling me what it’s doing with it, and not being able to minimize it. I don’t care if an os uses my ram if it’s actually doing something with it. But windows tends to just do whatever it feels like and doesn’t tell you what it’s doing. Stop using my ram.

its just as bad with like the page file and hiberfile.sys even with paging and hibernation disabled where it’ll eat some predetermined amount of space relative to your drive size and not actually tell you its doing this. So one day you run windirstat to discover your windows install folder is 113gb because you have a 40gb hiberfile.sys for a feature you never use.

 

Ah but it’s unused space so it doesn’t matter. I don’t care, why was it even doing that. RAM in windows is the same way, tell me what you’re doing and let me decide if it’s ok for you to idle at 12gb of ram. I doubt it will be, but stop hiding it regardless.

Its not wasteful for the OS to use the ram that is there for caching. No one is saying just burn ram for no good reason. Doing this improves overall system performance as you dont have to go to the SSD/HDD for those commonly used pieces of data. Its not hiding anything. Its not program data so as soon as a program requests it, the cached data is yeeted out of ram. The ram is still there usable for "what if an application wants it" otherwise that ram does absolutely nothing for you. You do not know better then the OS what can and cant be cached in your spare ram.

Saying page file is not doing anything is beyond false, keep it on. before the page file was a thing OOM errors will bluescreen
 

[cooky560]

2 hours ago, Vishera said:

8GB is enough for most games if your OS is completely debloated.

 

Right now i am on my Windows 2000 machine and 1GB of RAM is enough for those tasks (Modern versions of Windows are extremely bloated):

I still miss this style of windows ui

[8tg]

22 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Its not wasteful for the OS to use the ram that is there for caching. No one is saying just burn ram for no good reason. Doing this improves overall system performance as you dont have to go to the SSD/HDD for those commonly used pieces of data. Its not hiding anything. Its not program data so as soon as a program requests it, the cached data is yeeted out of ram. The ram is still there usable for "what if an application wants it" otherwise that ram does absolutely nothing for you. You do not know better then the OS what can and cant be cached in your spare ram.

Saying page file is not doing anything is beyond false, keep it on. before the page file was a thing OOM errors will bluescreen
 

I don’t care, I don’t want it to do that. And windows makes disabling that a nightmare.

Two machines, bome stock installs of XP and 11, sitting side by side completely idle.

Windows XP is using 100mb of ram and is doing nothing but waiting.

Windows 11 is using 4gb of ram, actively searching for updates, running defender scans, caching everything I can find just in case, letting me know about Cortana, live updating advertisements and the Microsoft store.

And yet both of them will open a web browser in pretty much the same amount of time.

 

It’s less about the lack of impact, it’s more about unneeded complexity. I don’t want it to do any of that.

[starsmine]

5 minutes ago, 8tg said:

I don’t care, I don’t want it to do that. And windows makes disabling that a nightmare.

Two machines, bome stock installs of XP and 11, sitting side by side completely idle.

Windows XP is using 100mb of ram and is doing nothing but waiting.

Windows 11 is using 4gb of ram, actively searching for updates, running defender scans, caching everything I can find just in case, letting me know about Cortana, live updating advertisements and the Microsoft store.

And yet both of them will open a web browser in pretty much the same amount of time.

 

It’s less about the lack of impact, it’s more about unneeded complexity. I don’t want it to do any of that.

Dont make up benchmarks that are proveably false to make your point. 
None of what you said here is true. 

[8tg]

11 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Dont make up benchmarks that are proveably false to make your point. 
 

Prove me wrong.

The N100 runs windows 10 and 11 upstairs. And there’s more. I have dedicated machines for almost every major windows version except 2k and ME.

If I really need to I can bust out a laptop from 1997 and show off 98SE being more responsive than windows 10 in general navigation even on a 25 year old 4200rpm 1.1gb hard drive, up against a modern nvme ssd.

 

I can assure you I have an extremely large amount of experience with this, I’m not just an annoying loser over windows bloat for no reason, it’s because I have daily experience with how horrendously inefficient windows has become by comparatively using less bloated versions of windows on a daily basis 

[WhitetailAni]

3 hours ago, Vishera said:

8GB is enough for most games if your OS is completely debloated.

 

Right now i am on my Windows 2000 machine and 1GB of RAM is enough for those tasks (Modern versions of Windows are extremely bloated):

1GB is way overkill for 2000. I have 2GB on my 2000 machine and I never see it go above 400MB or so no matter what I try

[Lurking]

1 hour ago, 8tg said:

I don’t care, I don’t want it to do that. And windows makes disabling that a nightmare.

Two machines, bome stock installs of XP and 11, sitting side by side completely idle.

Windows XP is using 100mb of ram and is doing nothing but waiting.

Windows 11 is using 4gb of ram, actively searching for updates, running defender scans, caching everything I can find just in case, letting me know about Cortana, live updating advertisements and the Microsoft store.

And yet both of them will open a web browser in pretty much the same amount of time.

 

It’s less about the lack of impact, it’s more about unneeded complexity. I don’t want it to do any of that.

You can disable/remove certain features you don't need. XP was designed for the hardware available then. It wasn't even designed for 64 bit, so more than 4GB wasn't really an option (yes, there was a 64 bit version, but that was an afterthought and sucked). It also is less secure etc. Modern OS also never really crash anymore. 

 

I may as well mention my Commodore 64 that ran on 64 kB and took 1 second to boot up after flipping the switch. But it had literally no features I need in 2024.

 

If you think XP is better, use it. It will not be secure or take advantage of modern hardware. 

 

Caching is in your favor. What else would you do with unused RAM? It isn't like you could get your money back if you don't use RAM. And just looking at RAM prices makes one realize even 16GB kits are pointless when 32GB kits cost almost the same. 

 

If an old 8GB system works for you, fine. But never ever advise someone buying a new (or used) system with less than 16GB is just bad advice.

[Vishera]

1 hour ago, WhitetailAni said:

1GB is way overkill for 2000. I have 2GB on my 2000 machine and I never see it go above 400MB or so no matter what I try

There is no way you will run Firefox on modern websites with only 512MB of RAM

If you look at the screenshot you will see that running Firefox with the LTT forums consumes more than 700MB of RAM

[Vishera]

2 hours ago, 8tg said:

I can assure you I have an extremely large amount of experience with this, I’m not just an annoying loser over windows bloat for no reason, it’s because I have daily experience with how horrendously inefficient windows has become by comparatively using less bloated versions of windows on a daily basis 

True, Windows becomes more and more bloated as time goes on.

My Windows 2000 screenshot running Firefox with the forums open while consuming only 700MB of RAM is a proof of that.

[Beerzerker]

If the machine you have now runs fine with 8 GB's that's fine. If it doesn't and you note excessive RAM useage, either you'd need more or you have a problem (Such as malware) taking place.

Most iterations of Windows, as time goes by uses more RAM by default for it's minimum requirement to run but yes, there are a few versions that are the same as an older version for basic requirments of RAM to use.
That's one reason why you see older systems with less and newer systems with more of it as a standard, but it's also due to the progress made with the tech being capable of having more RAM space on a stick of RAM to begin with.

These days IF building a brandnew system from scratch or just buying one that's pre-built, 16GB's or more makes perfect sense vs 8GB's but note that ONLY applies to a new build. If the machine is doing well with just 8GB's in it now, don't worry about it.

I've found alot of older systems can run newer OS's fairly well if the resources are there in the first place and RAM is definitely a resource it needs to function.

Just last year I had an AMD Socket 939 with an Athlon x2 4800 Toledo core chip browing the web to see how it would do and I had popped in a full 4GB's of RAM into the system, any less and it would have been struggling to say the least of it.

Performance (For basic stuff and web browsing) was acceptable, no real issues to mention about it but at the same time I know if wanting to use it for some heavy media stuff, gaming and so on it probrably would have choked....
And at least some of that would have been due to the limited amount of RAM available to it.

[seanondemand]

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

If you think 8GB is enough, then you are not using it for gaming, unless you consider web-based games "gaming" and not steam/epic.

I am not, and my original post said that if someone was doing everyday tasks, 8GB was probably enough (ie not gaming)

[Stahlmann]

16 hours ago, seanondemand said:

I am not, and my original post said that if someone was doing everyday tasks, 8GB was probably enough (ie not gaming)

This forum (and frankly the whole LTT community) consists mostly of gamers, for which gaming is an everyday task. So you might fare better by just saying office-type work. And in that case i agree. My parents probably also don't need more than 8GB for a bit of browsing.

[cooky560]

 

This was one video call, and 2 browser tabs, 8gb is pretty slim even for basic tasks

[Mark Kaine]

yeah, but for average gamer 8gb isnt enough typically and prob 90% of those do not post on here, so the hottake is just wrong imo. 

 

gamers =/= enthusiasts (necessarily) 

 

with only 8gb you'll realize quickly that its not enough for most modern games or other applications  (video editors, or people who model/render stuff etc, are also "enthusiasts"? can be, but not necessarily, so again,  no?)

 

tldr: from your description what you call enthusiasts i call normies, so we'll just have to agree to disagree? 

 

a better take would have been "8gb is enough for my personal needs because......." 

but that wouldn't be a "hottake" then, so while i definitely appreciate the effort,  i just cant follow the logic calling the average person "enthusiast" i guess.

[Mark Kaine]

dp

[starsmine]

5 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

This forum (and frankly the whole LTT community) consists mostly of gamers, for which gaming is an everyday task. So you might fare better by just saying office-type work. And in that case i agree. My parents probably also don't need more than 8GB for a bit of browsing.

The thing is, gaming is NOT enthusiast behavior. Non enthusiast still will do video calls on discord to do a large family call, or do some hobby like genealogy where a single family tree exceeds 20gb, or do art with layers and browsers of reference material. None of this is enthusiast behavior in the slightest. 

The person I know who does genealogy is doing it all on a i7 920 with a ATI HD 4350. But that platform fits their needs because of the triple channel memory making it easy to expand to the necessary amount for a family tree. 

We unfortunately know that there is no trend to dial back how heavy web browsing is, so you could skirt away with 8gb today babysitting it for a couple of tabs, but asking a non enthusiast to go out and buy a new PC in 2 years puts a bad taste in their mouth. Non enthusiasts are still going to have an email up, their news up, and a youtube tab up, that's already three tabs. plus whatever amazon/Shien tab they want, plus another tab for google docs/office 365. The spread they have to keep track of finances

Non-enthusiasts want a PC to do one thing and one thing only, JUST WORK. min maxing pure cost optimization by cutting 20 bucks out of a build that will break down on them as soon as they boot up sims 4 isn't just working. They wont know why, blame the wrong thing, and just be unhappy. 

8 GB is something you put into an enthusiast PC because enthusiasts like to tinker. Its not something you put into a non-enthusiast's build who wants to never have to be forced to think about it. Like yall dicking around with windows 2000 for the fun of it. 

TL:DR two tab browsing and a single word doc on 8gb laptop with an IGPU may work today, but not in 2025, telling someone to buy a new PC because they bought shit today makes them feel like shit. Especially when copilot is being put into 365 and has a minimum req of 16GB

[Mark Kaine]

On 1/22/2024 at 3:00 PM, WhitetailAni said:

Well, unused RAM is wasted RAM... given that it isn't doing anything else at the time, why not use it?

one reason: to avoid swapping when you *actually* need it...

 

unused ram is a reserve would be just as appropriate therefore