How long do you think 16GB of ram will be sufficient?

[Deivan8]

I am currently trying to figure out which motherboard to choose - mATX or ITX format. I think one of the main points is 2 vs 4 ram slots so do you think will 2x8gb ddr4 3000MHz ram will last at least 4 years for gaming/ modeling/texturing for games?

[jtmoseley]

6 minutes ago, Deivan8 said:

I am currently trying to figure out which motherboard to choose - mATX or ITX format. I think one of the main points is 2 vs 4 ram slots so do you think will 2x8gb ddr4 3000MHz ram will last at least 4 years for gaming/ modeling/texturing for games?

Should be fine, if not, you could always get 2 16 gb kits

[TheGlenlivet]

I would think the 4 year goal is realistic.  Vram in GPUs keeps going up, so system requirements haven't changed much in the last few years/generations.  

Now, video editing and other production stuff is a different story.  So are some outlaying stuff like flight siming.  That can use a lot of system ram.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

12 minutes ago, Deivan8 said:

I am currently trying to figure out which motherboard to choose - mATX or ITX format. I think one of the main points is 2 vs 4 ram slots so do you think will 2x8gb ddr4 3000MHz ram will last at least 4 years for gaming/ modeling/texturing for games?

It'll be fine. 

[AncientNerd]

Meaningless question because it depends on what you are doing. I already find 16GB insufficient for most day to day work both at work and home. I regularly run into bottlenecks where I am out of physical memory and have a big part of my 32GB swap file full...however that's just me. My wife who does similar work but uses different tools has no problems at all in 16GB for both home and work. So...it depends on what you are going to do.

 

My personal inclination is to have all the memory you can afford and as many memory slots as you processor supports, but as you can see I use memory hogging tools. 

[jtmoseley]

Just now, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

It'll be fine. 

I mean I would argue that in 4 years you won't have the same motherboard anyways and who knows maybe ddr4 will be surpasses

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

4 hours ago, jtmoseley said:

I mean I would argue that in 4 years you won't have the same motherboard anyways and who knows maybe ddr4 will be surpasses

You can always add more memory down the road. Even after 4 years, I don't see an absolute necessity to do a platform upgrade. I've been using the same configuration for almost 7 years albeit more RAM and a SSD was added on later down the road.

[Mira Yurizaki]

22 minutes ago, Deivan8 said:

I am currently trying to figure out which motherboard to choose - mATX or ITX format. I think one of the main points is 2 vs 4 ram slots so do you think will 2x8gb ddr4 3000MHz ram will last at least 4 years for gaming/ modeling/texturing for games?

A rule of thumb is figure out how much memory you're likely going to use when you're doing work and double that. If your work on average only caps out at 8-9GB, 16GB should be fine for you for at least a few years.

[SupaKomputa]

DDR4 will support 16gb on a single stick.

so with 2 slots you can get to 32gb in the future.

[Radium_Angel]

Been running 16GB for photography for the past 10 years on my systems, I've only recently begun to look for more, as I'm doing videography now as well and that really chews up the RAM.

[dizmo]

Long enough that you don't need to worry about it.

[Sasbom]

As for texturing and modelling, that doesn't usually take up too much RAM.

 

It depends on how big your scene files are, and how dense your models are, 

textures get loaded into VRAM and unless you're working with 8K full PBR shaders you don't have anything to worry about I guess.

If you're going to get into CPU rendering, you might want to upgrade your RAM.

 

There are also very neat CPU + GPU render engines available, the current version of Vray can handle hybrid rendering and I think Maxwell does as well, but

I think that for the things you are trying to do that's a little too ambitious.

TLDR:

You're fine with 16Gb ram at the moment, especially if you have a decent GPU.

[gbergeron]

3 hours ago, Deivan8 said:

I am currently trying to figure out which motherboard to choose - mATX or ITX format. I think one of the main points is 2 vs 4 ram slots so do you think will 2x8gb ddr4 3000MHz ram will last at least 4 years for gaming/ modeling/texturing for games?

5 Years + for gaming

[Ebony Falcon]

Gaming, Netflix and like 5 tabs discord open, hwinfo afterburner 

Skype, and blizzard and steam open and I still don't really go over 10gb even In big open world games 

 

I just do t get what people do to eat up so much ram, even video editing, in davinch resolve I cut up my game play and edit it and then render it for YouTube and even then Gpus are at like 30 percent and ram is 7gb max 

 

I don't no if I'm doing something wrong but I've never ever run into a ram problem even 

[Deivan8]

4 hours ago, AncientNerd said:

Meaningless question because it depends on what you are doing. I already find 16GB insufficient for most day to day work both at work and home. I regularly run into bottlenecks where I am out of physical memory and have a big part of my 32GB swap file full...however that's just me. My wife who does similar work but uses different tools has no problems at all in 16GB for both home and work. So...it depends on what you are going to do.

 

My personal inclination is to have all the memory you can afford and as many memory slots as you processor supports, but as you can see I use memory hogging tools. 

May I ask what work you do and what programs are you using?

[SupaKomputa]

 

As an illustrations:

Browsing website in chrome with 30-50 tabs open : 8gb

If you have 8gb only, windows will give chrome like 5gb and 3gb will be moved to hdd as paging memory (swap).

If you have limited memory, inactive tabs will be moved to paging memory, if you access it again, it would have be moved back to active memory (ram).

Without paging memory i can access inactive tabs almost instantly.

With 16gb i never had any page memory used.

Some people will say they have no problem with 8gb memory until they check the paging memory usage.

 

Gaming, a game will use active memory (ram) and video memory in gpu (vram).

For graphic & 3d processing it would use Vram, most modern games use 2-4gb or vram, if you have limited vram, then the rest of graphic memory will use your memory, if the memory is full, it will use page memory (hdd). So if you have 1gb vram and the game want 4gb, 3 gb will be stored in your memory (ram) and so on.

For game data calculations like scores, coordinates etc the game will use active memory (ram). Some games need 1-3 gb for this.

With 8 gb of ram you can game without problems as long as no other programs running at the same time.

If any program running, the memory used is moved to paging memory.

 

Adobe photoshop, editing a 20mp picture would consume like 3-5gb of memory.

Adobe premiere, 3 minutes video : 8-12 gb. You can set premiere to use all of the memory as a swap, premiere loves more memory.

 

[AncientNerd]

15 hours ago, Deivan8 said:

May I ask what work you do and what programs are you using?

Software development primarily data manipulation and visualization. The base tools I use are actually MS Visual Studio with custom plugins, plus a bunch of stuff I wrote myself. Plus database servers of various types - running both locally and remotely with the data viewer running locally or remotely. This is both at work and at home. I can't talk about current by my last job was working with petabytes of data at a time to determine its validity. 

[JR88]

For Quite Some time. Oh I'm gonna be ecstatic today got some generic looks ok built X58 mobo that will be on the Bench today and hopefully will boot with some old Chips that were still good.

I don't know seller swearing it accepts allll 1366 chips even all the Xeons and it can overclock on a 6 phase board not even 8. so I don't know find out...