Gadgetory

hi and welcome back to hardware unboxed I'm your host Matt and today we're going to be taking a look at how much memory or RAM your gaming rig needs to deliver optimal performance and all of the latest titles recently I've noticed a lot of discussion regarding system memory and many gamers are now suggesting that 16 gigabytes is the new minimum or standard configuration for the most part I recommend friends go with 8 gigabytes of memory and only go up to 16 gigabytes if they have the money to spare as after all it's not a huge investment these days even when talking about ddr4 still I was interested to see what kind of impact the memory capacities had on typical modern high-end gaming systems the platform of choice today was the Intel LGA 1150 using a core i5 4690k processor to help keep the results consistent and remove any system bottlenecks at the same time the 4690k was overclocked and locked at 4 gigahertz with features such as turbo boost and speed steps disabled for the GPU we went with the mighty geforce gtx 980ti and testing was conducted at 4k the same DVI through 2400 memory was used in each test and the exact same memory timings are also used I'm most interested to see if there's any difference between using a gigabytes and 16 gigabytes of memory but just for the hell of it I went with a 4 gigabyte single channel configuration as well rather than go with a completely fresh installation of Windows we decided it was better to use an operating system that has been pre lived in granted Windows 10 hasn't been out for very long but my personal gaming system has a heap of applications and of course games already installed when testing I had Firefox and Chrome open in the background each with half a dozen tabs open my email client thunderbird was also open along with a few Excel and Word documents all told with 16 gigabytes of memory installed the system is consuming 4.8 eager bytes of memory before any gaming it even started it's also worth mentioning that the page file was enabled while testing and Samsung SSD 850 pro 2 terabytes is a storage device of choice first up we have Grand Theft Auto 5 and the results are very surprising all three memory configurations are an average of 41 frames per second at 4k the minimum frame rates are also much the same the 4 gigabyte configuration drops just a single frame when compared to the 8 gigabyte and 16 gigabyte configurations the frame time data doesn't reveal anything new either all three memory configurations allow for roughly the same frame time performance so now for the really boring part the next 21 games all show very much the same performance Transit's grand theft auto 5 rather than make you sit through another 21 slides where I say the same things over and over again I'll quickly skip through them if you want to study any of the results in detail just hit pause and please note that I'll include a timestamp index in the video description below you well those results are very boring and quite surprising if I'm honest well I didn't expect to see any difference between using 8 gigabytes and 16 gigabytes of memory for gaming I was very surprised to see that running just 4 gigabytes of memory made little to no difference in fact when gaming I honestly couldn't tell the difference between using an individual 4 gigabyte stick in single channel opposed to two 4 gigabyte modules running in dual channel for an 8 gigabyte capacity as far as I could tell level load times are also very much the same though they could be in part due to the Samsung SSD it would be interesting to run these tests again using a mechanical hard drive but how many gamers worried about getting the most out of they've really got honestly still using spinning discs for those wondering I did also try testing at lower resolutions such as 1080p and the results were the same as expected they were also the same when using a slower GPU such as the geforce gtx 960 despite the evidence I strongly recommend gamers install less eight gigabytes of memory in their systems starting at just $40 for a kit with two four gigabyte modules it doesn't make sense to use anything less of course if you can afford to spend a little extra and get a 16 gigabyte kid then by all means do so but for those on a tight budget that 40 or 50 dollars would certainly provide much more performance when invested in a better GPU for example thanks for tuning into Hardware unbox this has been your host Matt let me know what you think in the comments hit like hit subscribe and we'll see you next time you