Laptop RAM Question

[Guest]

Hi, I'm saving up for a new laptop and I need something that can handle some decently heavy video stuff for on the go. My understanding is that for high end things like this is that RAM is very helpful, but is it still possible to get the job done with a lower amount? Like would it just take longer? Or would I have to have that high amount of RAM in order for things to must work? 

[Pugs501]

What laptop are you using?

[Guest]

What laptop are you using?

That's what I'm trying to decide. I need to know if I can still get the job done with a lower amount of RAM. So once I know this I can make a decision. 

[RedSphyxis]

more RAM allows more productivity, even if you edit videos it would still vary on how heavy you could consume them while editing. 16GB is a sweetspot but 8GB is enough to get you by. Assuming that you wont be doing multiple things at the same time.

[pwn_intended]

unless youre getting a ballin-ass laptop with a top of the line cpu, 8GB ought to be good enough for you and not bottleneck you too much anyway. 16 is nice, but like I said, only really necessary if you have the budget because of diminishing returns.

[Guest]

Right but am I still able to get the job done with a lower amount of RAM? Is more RAM just helpful because it makes it able for you to more than one thing at the same time? 

[tmlhalo]

The example I always use is imagine you're cooking. Hunting ingredients out the fridge (HDD) can take time finding them especially if it is unorganised (fragmentation). Once you have all the stuff you need you put it on the counter (RAM) so you can get to it easier. You can have a shit ton of counter space but if you're only making a sandwich then a lot of that counter space isn't doing anything. (Buying like 64 GBs of ram for like web browsing...) The reverse though is if you don't have enough counter space you have to take an ingredient you are using back to the fridge and then re get the one you're using in this step of the recipee. So it can be time consuming if your recipee needs a lot of ingredients that you have to keep going back and forth to the fridge. If your amount of ram is extremely low (think doesn't even meet the minimum requirements), then you can't even fit the single ingredient you need in the next step on your counter. Like trying to prepare a turkey on a fold out airplane tray. So having less than enough ram slows you down since things have to be moved to and from the hdd more. Unless you have so little ram it just doesn't work. 8 GBs is the minimum I would recommend for light editing work, though you really want 16 or more for moderate to heavy editing.

[pwn_intended]

Right but am I still able to get the job done with a lower amount of RAM? Is more RAM just helpful because it makes it able for you to more than one thing at the same time? 

more ram helps by making it so that you can have more things open at the same time without having to swap RAM (that means copying contents of ram to the HDD back and forth).

More RAM is helpful, especially if youre a tab junkie in your internet browser, as you can easily get your browser to take up 5+GB of you have like 30 tabs open.

8 GB is sufficient for most people and will be enough to be comfortable doing some video editing, but for that 16 would be a nice buffer. That being said, if youre buying a laptop that is going to be tailored towards editing with all of the other hardware to match, 16 would be the way to go, and if you can find a laptop that coems with 4 DIMM slots (2 taken and 2 empty) then you can get away with only 8 for now and upgrading for cheaper when/if you feel like it.

[Guest]

I don't need some kind of complicated answer, I just need to know if I can get the job done with less RAM 

[CommandMan7]

8 GB will work, but if you are using all of it, video editing will be slower than if you weren't using all of it. If you plan on editing more than ~20 minutes of video at a time you should try to get 16 GB. Don't even consider 4GB, maybe 6GB if you really can't afford more, but even that's stretching it. When RAM is full, editors tend to get unresponsive and glitchy. I'm not an expert by any means, but that's my experience.