Can you tell the difference between 8gb and 16gb ram?

Forums › Laptops and mobile computers › Can you tell the difference between 8gb and 16gb ram?

Finch

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Topic # 205858 29-Nov-2016 21:13

Hey guys.

Looking to buy myself a new laptop shortly. My Old laptop had 16GB Ram, which was cool to have however not sure if it was making a difference or not. My laptop never frooze or anything and I could have lots of things open at once and it was fine.

I'm seeing now that 8GB seems to be the norm, wondering if that was acceptable or should I go for the 16GB? Just doing daily activities, using Video making software too, so nothing bardcore like gaming.

Had anybody had a 16GB machine then gone down to an 8GB?

Thanks for the advice.

Edit: Forgot to mention Laptop will be running Win10.

toyonut

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Reply # 1679820 29-Nov-2016 21:19

Daily work machine is 16GB. Home laptop is 8GB. I don't miss the extra 8GB for anything I do at home. I mainly value 16GB at work for the ability to either load up a massive code test suite or run multiple testing VM's. For anything I do at home, I have never noticed 8GB to be a limitation.

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Dynamic

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Reply # 1679821 29-Nov-2016 21:21

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A Solid State Drive will make more of a difference than 8Gb <--> 16Gb of Ram for the average enthusiast occasionally editing home video. A SSD is harder to retrofit later (as a complete Windows reinstall is required unless you have the skills (or want to have a go after doing a FULL backup) to clone the drive so I would put this before the bigger RAM.

Laptops generally have 2 RAM slots. If you buy an 8Gb laptop, check whether it has one 8Gb module and one spare slot. If it has two 4Gb modules, and you later want to go to 16Gb, you'll have to remove the original 8Gb (and secondhand RAM is not worth much to sell).

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tdgeek

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Reply # 1679825 29-Nov-2016 21:25

To accurately answer the OP, 8GB

Finch

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Reply # 1679841 29-Nov-2016 21:51

Thanks guys.

Yeah definitely getting a laptop with a SSD too.

Thanks.

tdgeek

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Reply # 1679846 29-Nov-2016 22:00

Finch: Thanks guys.

Yeah definitely getting a laptop with a SSD too.

Thanks.

Dang, I'd hoped the last post was in response to my facetious post, which is actually one of the most accurate posts ever posted!!! :-)

On a serious note SSD is great. My Macbook starts from cold, in 10 seconds OSX is up, internet is on (I have Safari to start on startup and to display the last websites I was on)

I use Windows also but not on SSD but that would be the same. The traditional hard drive is very slow, as it uses mechanical tech. Spinning drives, heads that need to navigate to the start file marker etc.

Batman

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Reply # 1700216 8-Jan-2017 14:28

8-16GB no difference to the home user unless long 1080p video editing is involved

Swype on iOS is detrimental to accurate typing. Apologies in advance.

richms

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Reply # 1700272 8-Jan-2017 18:19

few dozen chrome tabs and my 8gb lappy starts to really show the slowdown. Keep it to a couple only and not have anything else running and its fine for just browsing.

Its far to slow for me to bother trying to edit video on in premiere, last time I tried export was about 8fps so was going to take about 7x longer than the video I was exporting. Eeek. Desktop manages 25-28 fps so a little more than 2x longer which is far more tollerable. The lappy is ok for editing basic 1080 footage on as in picking it out and sticking it onto the timeline and trimming etc, but really struggles with any effects like stabalization and similar, so I tend to just have the lappy there to take content from the camera and watch it and trim it into the timeline and then finish it off on the gaming PC.

Ive knocked the desktop back to 32 gigs because I thought it might be the cause of instability having all slots full, but it didnt help with stability and the drop from 64 was not noticible. Just too lazy to stick the ram back in since that never seemed to help at all.

Richard rich.ms

coffeebaron

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Reply # 1700284 8-Jan-2017 19:21

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As above, 16GB won't make any difference for day to day stuff, but if there is little price difference, then of course nothing wrong with a bit of overkill :)

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darylblake

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Reply # 1700291 8-Jan-2017 19:37

My home pc has 16gb of ram (PC), my work laptop has 8gb (Mac).

If I have a LOT of stuff open then yeh for work my machine is a bit slower, but everything hauls on my home desktop.

Batman

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Reply # 1700293 8-Jan-2017 19:53

richms:

few dozen chrome tabs and my 8gb lappy starts to really show the slowdown. Keep it to a couple only and not have anything else running and its fine for just browsing.

Its far to slow for me to bother trying to edit video on in premiere, last time I tried export was about 8fps so was going to take about 7x longer than the video I was exporting. Eeek. Desktop manages 25-28 fps so a little more than 2x longer which is far more tollerable. The lappy is ok for editing basic 1080 footage on as in picking it out and sticking it onto the timeline and trimming etc, but really struggles with any effects like stabalization and similar, so I tend to just have the lappy there to take content from the camera and watch it and trim it into the timeline and then finish it off on the gaming PC.

Ive knocked the desktop back to 32 gigs because I thought it might be the cause of instability having all slots full, but it didnt help with stability and the drop from 64 was not noticible. Just too lazy to stick the ram back in since that never seemed to help at all.

From my open tabs, it's about 120-250MB of RAM per Chrome tab (64-bit) - say using pessimistic calculation, that's about 16 tabs open per 4GB, or 32 tabs using optimistic calculation.

Swype on iOS is detrimental to accurate typing. Apologies in advance.

Batman

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Reply # 1700388 8-Jan-2017 23:45

A f1 news page managed to score 300MB RAM but another page presumably gmail "only" took up 90MB

Swype on iOS is detrimental to accurate typing. Apologies in advance.

mattwnz

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Reply # 1700391 8-Jan-2017 23:56

For future proofing, I would get 16GB if it isn't much more. Any graphic based like photoshop, video editing etc, can benefit from more RAM.

Jaxson

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Reply # 1700402 9-Jan-2017 06:57

It all depends on what you are doing on the device, as to whether it needs the extra RAM.

For example: Edit videos with lots of effects, and it will benefit greatly from more RAM.

Batman

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Reply # 1700409 9-Jan-2017 08:16

mattwnz:

For future proofing, I would get 16GB if it isn't much more. Any graphic based like photoshop, video editing etc, can benefit from more RAM.

It is not wise to try too hard to future proof computers. Yes if for a few bucks, yes if you need the specs, won't worry too much if you don't fall into the 16GB RAM category. Even with normal photoediting and tonnes of chrome tabs open and tens of stuff loaded I hardly get anywhere near 8GB RAM. The only time I climb above 8GB on the laptop is if I combine 16 24MP RAW photos on photoshop, I don't edit videos so I don't know the threshold for video editing. (Laptop has 16GB, Desktop has 32GB)

Swype on iOS is detrimental to accurate typing. Apologies in advance.

TwoSeven

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Reply # 1700595 9-Jan-2017 18:05

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If it were me, I would probably go for 16Gb if the laptop is not upgradable with new memory and if within budget, and if it is upgradeable, I would still try and go for 16Gb if the cost is not so much different. Having said that, if one has a machine with an SSD in it and is only running office style apps (Office, Youtube, Netflix etc) then 8Gb will likely be sufficient (I have this in my surface pro for example). However if one is going to layer up some video editing software and potentially other apps at the same time, then the higher amount of memory can be of use. Poor performance due to memory can show up in different ways, such as sluggishness or jittering (where an app stops briefly) as I/O occurs.

A way that I like to think of this, is that in a 64 bit windows system, each 32 bit application (process) gets its own 4Gb address space, and each 64 bit application (process) gets from a users point of view, an unlimited amount - this is different from the old 32 bit windows days where the total memory available to applications was 2Gb + the page file (4Gb + page file if one includes system memory) shared between all apps. In this regard, on a 64 bit OS, one can think of physical memory and the hard disk space as each being a form of cache in that if the data is not there in physical memory, it is fetched from disk.

As I recall things, in windows 10, the total amount of memory available (called the peak system commit charge) is the sum of the physical memory installed and all of the page files. If there is not enough physical memory to store data in, older memory pages are pushed out to the page file. If physical memory is accessed, but the required page is not there, a page fault occurs, the thread that was running is suspended while the page is fetched from the page file - sometimes this might show up in task manager with the CPU going to 100% (it could be waiting for data). If too many page faults for an app occur in a short time, the performance of the app is affected (and perhaps the other apps as well).

just my thoughts.

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