[beancurry]

Its amazing how the OS requirements for RAM has increased with each windows versions. I tend to set my windows box to maximum performance so that it uses less of my resources. Linux has many distos that are build to use less resources, puppy linux being one of them.

[CHT]

Its amazing how the OS requirements for RAM has increased with each windows versions.

I wouldn't say it as amazing. Rather, it's expected because of all the new features piling up, though Vista technically had the highest RAM requirements, due to some reason.

[brocartel]

I think 8Gb is more than enough especially for gaming... You just have to disable some unwanted services and programs that Windows Auto Runs... In Windows 10 it Runs so many things that may be why... I youtube searched a way to get better gaming performance and some videos help Disable all the Unwanted Tasks starting up, Processes Like OneDrive, Xbox, etc... Then after you set everything 8Gb is plenty of ram and what the average software,games,etc. run today... 8Gb Ram is perfect however you can upgrade just incase but if you do have 8Gb your fine and should just stay there.

[AleksssBoss157]

For me 8 gb ram is enough.I don't use any fancy programs.I just use photoshop,cyberlink power director,camtasia,obs and some games,a browser.The photoshop is a bit laggy but 8 gb is enough.

[TammysHead]

For me, 8 Gb is enough for EVERYTHING. All Programs work perfect. At Gaming, i have at leat 60 fps, so its ok. SYou dont need more. Maybe a new CPU or GPU?

[Barnum4000]

For me, 8 Gb is enough for EVERYTHING. All Programs work perfect. At Gaming, i have at leat 60 fps, so its ok. SYou dont need more. Maybe a new CPU or GPU?

My CPU and GPU is fine and I was getting good performance but I wanted to have more applications concurrently without affecting the performance. Now I don't have to be careful with how much RAM I have because I have so much of it.

[eclisseweb]

I'm using windows 10 on a desktop pc and I've  noticed that with the lasts updates my pc goes slowly with 8gb of ram and i5core intel microprocessor. I must to upgrade my ram to 16 gb minimum to prevent crashes.

[shubhangtiwari]

Running a Linux Machine - 8GB is sufficient.

Running Mac or Windows - at least 16GB

[p1ayfu1]

8GB is enough at the moment and if it stops being enough then you can easily upgrade to 16GB of RAM.

[xewobisew]

I'm using 32GB and I that is not enought form me. How could you be using only 8

[pancardo]

I recently upgraded my PC from 8GB to RAM to 24GB of RAM. I did this to future proof my PC a bit longer and for me at least 8GB was barely enough. I was using at least 90% of the 8GB when running intense applications making it ard for me to have other applications like web browsers open at the same time. With the new upgrade everything runs a lot smoother and I now only use about 25% of the memory.

Do you think that 8GB is enough RAM or is more required to have  a smooth experience?

Hi,

  I think that 8 GB is often a good amount of memory for the average usage. But, in my case, more memory is always helpful for apps that consume too much RAM, like video editors, games, and programming code debuggers.

Greetings

[liverson117]

I recently upgraded my PC from 8GB to RAM to 24GB of RAM. I did this to future proof my PC a bit longer and for me at least 8GB was barely enough. I was using at least 90% of the 8GB when running intense applications making it ard for me to have other applications like web browsers open at the same time. With the new upgrade everything runs a lot smoother and I now only use about 25% of the memory.

Do you think that 8GB is enough RAM or is more required to have  a smooth experience?

I thing 8 GB are the minimum to have a good experience in general, but 12 is better. Also with 12 GB you don' spend too much! I thing 24 GB is OP and maybe you could have used that money to buy a better graphic card (for ex.)

[Barnum4000]

I thing 8 GB are the minimum to have a good experience in general, but 12 is better. Also with 12 GB you don' spend too much! I thing 24 GB is OP and maybe you could have used that money to buy a better graphic card (for ex.) 

At the time when I purchased the RAM, it wasn't that expensive and my graphics card was already good enough for what I needed it to do. Of course, RAM prices has spiked recently because of the increased demands for smartphones. Personally, I am glad I got a large amount of RAM since it now costs more and has easily used over 10GB of RAM at times.

[Julian98]

A big problem with modern operation systems is that they pre-allocate the installed RAM. So if you have 8GB it's quite common that the system tells you only 10% are 'free', but this doesn't mean you are getting out of memory. On most UNIX alike systems you can look up the really in-use amount of memory by using the command 'top'. The total amount of memory is divided in 'free' / 'used' / 'buff/cache' where only the used amount can't be used elsewhere (obviously).
Using this command you should see that most of the time (according to my experiences) even 4GB of RAM is far enough for surfing and playing around.
Never the less using a SSD as main storage allows your system to operate smoothly even on low memory, so I think also today 8GB is a fair amount of RAM.

[nicomunet]

It actually depends on things you do on computer. 
I have 4 GB of soldered RAM (thank you, Apple) in my laptop, and it feels smooth in a lot of things (Chrome with 5-8 tabs, playing video, running virtual machines, even playing some games), and in other things  it is totally garbage (i.e. Android IDE is usable, but very slow).

So, yeah, if you want to edit videos, or use Android SDK - you'd better buy RAM, or new computer with 16+ gigs of RAM.

[Julian98]

It actually depends on things you do on computer. 
I have 4 GB of soldered RAM (thank you, Apple) in my laptop, and it feels smooth in a lot of things (Chrome with 5-8 tabs, playing video, running virtual machines, even playing some games), and in other things  it is totally garbage (i.e. Android IDE is usable, but very slow).

So, yeah, if you want to edit videos, or use Android SDK - you'd better buy RAM, or new computer with 16+ gigs of RAM.

Yes i agree the Android IDE or Android Studio is quite demanding in resources, unless you develop in a more simple editor and use the IDE only for compiling and packing the apk-files.
But to my knowledge most Apple laptops should have a SSD on bord so this should also be helpful to accelerate some applications.
As you said even some games should work nicely if they don't load graphics in 4K or have to detail-rich 3d-models on board.
And if you can run a virtual machine everything else should work as well, maybe just as said a little bit slower.

[pancardo]

It actually depends on things you do on computer. 
I have 4 GB of soldered RAM (thank you, Apple) in my laptop, and it feels smooth in a lot of things (Chrome with 5-8 tabs, playing video, running virtual machines, even playing some games), and in other things  it is totally garbage (i.e. Android IDE is usable, but very slow).

So, yeah, if you want to edit videos, or use Android SDK - you'd better buy RAM, or new computer with 16+ gigs of RAM.

Yes i agree the Android IDE or Android Studio is quite demanding in resources, unless you develop in a more simple editor and use the IDE only for compiling and packing the apk-files.
But to my knowledge most Apple laptops should have a SSD on bord so this should also be helpful to accelerate some applications.
As you said even some games should work nicely if they don't load graphics in 4K or have to detail-rich 3d-models on board.
And if you can run a virtual machine everything else should work as well, maybe just as said a little bit slower. 

If you are a programmer or designer, you will definitely need RAM. IDEs generally consume a lot of memory. I have 16 GB and I still need a little more ...

Android SDK, Visual Studio, Vegas Pro, Corel, Adobe Photoshop are some applications that consume a lot.

Best regards

[rinixyre]

I have 16GB ram and I don't even use it. Usualy I use 8-10GB of it. I think 8 GB is enough, cause my usage is with more then 100 windows opened.

[davidvpn]

On the PC Im using now I have 16GB. The only time I capped that was when I was hosting servers

On my other PC I have 32GB, never capped that even when hosting servers

[designview]

Speed is not only depend upon RAM size. If You use latest technology processor then increasing RAM size can speedup PC. But for 1st 2nd 3rd generation intel processors 8GB to 16GB ram is enough to run multi tasking on PC

[Dragonix12]

8GB is still enough. However, your definition of "enough" varies between people's use cases. If you are a heavy Chrome user like me that constantly has 20+ tabs open at the same time with a bunch of other programs running, you probably want more than 8GB RAM if you want to run some games at the same time chrome is running. Chrome unfortunately hogs a bunch of RAM. If you closed all other programs and just purely ran a game, 8GB RAM is definitely enough even for modern gaming titles.

[jenniferuq1309]

The first page is mostly filled with "if you're not playing games, just using the www, 8GB is enough". But they date from 2016. It is now September 2018.

8GB is now barely enough. Because Chrome has become a memory hog. I've now switched back to Firefox. I have two computers with just 4GB. NOT enough for web browsing. Load just two sites with either Chrome or Firefox, and the hard disk LED just stay lit. For those, I switched back to Palemoon. Seems to work better.

On my main computer, I have 16GB. If I open too many sites in Chrome, I can get this one to use up all the RAM and cause the hard disk LED to stay lit.

I suspect it is not just the browsers' fault. It's the way websites are constructed these days. You go to any website, and it tries to load 200 files before your page finish loading. The use of frameworks and packages have gone out of hand. One thing is built on top of another on top of another. Load any site, and you can see the different sites your browser has to go to to get this or that stuff to render the page properly. It didn't used to be like this. You go to a website, it loads a HTML file and maybe a couple of pictures. Maybe two reads and writes to the database. Even slightly later, with php and javascript, sites could load in less than half a second because all the files were from the same server. You don't have to wait for dns queries, to get 50 components from different sites around the world just to display a simple news article.

[khoshbin]

8GB of RAM is also good for upto Windows 10 OS with x64 processors and also good for gaming and some graphical works.
But if You need more RAM you can SWAP some space from your Hard or USB Flash Drive and Add it to your 8GB RAM.
SWAP is the best option for users who don't want to upgrade their system and want to temporarily Add some RAM Capacity.

[Genesis]

8GB of RAM is also good for upto Windows 10 OS with x64 processors and also good for gaming and some graphical works.
But if You need more RAM you can SWAP some space from your Hard or USB Flash Drive and Add it to your 8GB RAM.
SWAP is the best option for users who don't want to upgrade their system and want to temporarily Add some RAM Capacity.

How would you SWAP space from your hard disk and add it to your RAM?

[SonLight]

8GB of RAM is also good for upto Windows 10 OS with x64 processors and also good for gaming and some graphical works.
But if You need more RAM you can SWAP some space from your Hard or USB Flash Drive and Add it to your 8GB RAM.
SWAP is the best option for users who don't want to upgrade their system and want to temporarily Add some RAM Capacity.

How would you SWAP space from your hard disk and add it to your RAM? 

Very  S L O W L Y. It's called thrashing. Unless you have an IBM 650, of course, in which case the disk is the main memory. That had an optimizing assembler that would try to guess how long each instruction would take to execute, and space consecutive instructions out on the disk to minimize the time lost to rotation.

[jamiewalker]

The amount of RAM depends on your purpose. If you're playing games, 8GB is good, not excellent. Modern games require a minimum of 8 GB. If you're working on the Internet 8GB is pretty enough for you. But if you're an architect or an engineer who works in memory consuming applications, you will need at least 16GB of memory.

[Kreesher]

It always connected to the end use you give on your machine. If you don't push a lot the machine 8GB can always do the job. (browsing the web, email.. the trivial things)

I have 8GB on mac os x and I feel the need for more. Since I work with 3D software, Adobe suite and software that are pushing a lot the minimum nowdays should be 16GB by far. 

Also having SSD helps a lot on the speed and having a better performance. So to be future prof always bet in 16GB with  SSD and you will be good for a long time. The idea when buying any machine since everything is weld to the motherboard it's better and always will be give a bit more money for a good hardware but last longer in the long run.

[airthegame]

My  ram experience: 8gb memory in this world is very minimal .. my laptop also has 8gb of memory but i feel it is not enough to run new games .. we need minimum 12gb and 16GB recommended the new game playing:)

[xdude]

My current desktop is an i5 with 64bit setup. I bought some used parts like Processor, RAM and mother board and rest new. I was moving from 4GB 32bit 4GM RAM setup so I think 8GB DDR3 going to be more than enough. I'm not a gamer. But seems in a 64 bit system 8GB RAM is not a lot. When I open lots of Tabs on both Chrome and Firefox RAM usage goes upto 7GB sometimes and things start slow down. I didn't expect this but I guess that's the reality. I'm thinking about upgrading it to 16GB but I wonder if it's worth the money.

[Genesis]

@xdude I upgraded my Dell computer (model dated 2014 - Dell Optiplex 990) to 16 GB. I had one of those techs in a workshop completely re install the OS - in preparation for my move to South Africa at end of 2016 - and thought since I had purchased cheap memory in one of those souks in UAE - that he could install it for me at the same time. So I upgraded it from 8 GB to 16 GB. It did make a difference for me. But I think Windows 7 is not as good any longer with updating the system to current technology. I'm still not ready for Windows 10 - but think that things have come to the stage that most programmers are programming for Windows 10 and tweaking for other Windows. So maybe I'm not getting the optimum speed and efficiency I should from my new upgraded memory.

So I'm curious, what Windows are you using on your new system?