Question Enough Memory?

[ShrimpSmith]

Hi, I recently upgraded from a 4th gen Intel I7 to a Ryzen 6 9600x. I am normally strictly and Intel person but I decided to give AMD another chance. I also have Nvidia 4070 12 gig GPU. I have 64 Gig DDR5 5600 memory. I do play games but enjoy video editing for the kids I coach. I regret only having 16 gigs on my old rig. Do you think 64 gigs is enough this time around?

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Hi and welcome.

32gb is more than enough for gaming, I imagine that for some casual video editing 64GB would be plenty. I dont think whether you have AMD or Intel makes any difference for RAM requirements, but I dont really know much about anything outside of gaming so maybe someone else would have more to say about that.

 

[Colif]

Depends on your usage. Everyone is different, we all have different things that load with windows or have different needs.
More ram can also help if you run virtual machines. its about only time I use more than 20gb of ram. Lets you make them bigger and possibly more useful. I have given a win 10 VM 8gb of ram to use so its not too slow to run.

Windows also grows if you have more ram, it expands to use it more efficiently. So its difficult to compare usage exactly. I noticed the jump from 4gb to 16gb more than the one from 16 to 32. But my personal usage also grew as I had more space too.

I have 32gb now but always seem to be using 47% of my virtual memory at all times. Which makes me think having 64gb of ram might decrease the percentage of virtual memory I use

The most I have ever used was 96% but that was playing Diablo 4 and it had a memory leak.

Virtual memory = Ram + Page File. So the more ram you have, the bigger it is.
Virtual Memory is used by windows to lie to programs about how much memory they have. It allows you to run more programs than you have physical ram for. Many processes automatically run in Page file, so not having one can lead to out of memory errors. Probably Too much info

Page file is an area on your C Drive used to run processes that don't need to run in ram. It can shrink and grow to 3x the size of your ram amount. You really don't want to use page file as its slower than ram and uses space on your ssd/nvme. More ram you have, the smaller page file needs to be. My PC rarely uses the page file now, below shows its less than 1 gb now.

So to me 64gb of DDR5 is the minimum needed in my next PC, but I couldn't convince self to choose 96gb as the price is a little steep.