Gadgetory

the original inspiration for this video came when Alex craftily turned the surface laptop he'd just finished writing the review for into his daily driver and realized that our model unfortunately only has 8 gigs of RAM with no way to upgrade it but does that matter well the commonly held wisdom for years has been that unless you're some kind of power user 8 gigs ought to be enough for everyone we'll hold on with Windows 10 and Chrome devouring memory like Kobayashi at a hot-dog-eating contest we've been regularly seeing memory usage over 20 gigs just from web browsing on our writing workstations so we started an investigation ek waterblock says MLC phoenix lineup is designed around quick disconnect couplings and brings a modular approach to connecting and expanding your water cooling loop learn more at the link below so our testing rig has a core i7 7700 K a gtx 1080i and a one terabyte SATA SSD then we equipped it with 4 8 16 or 32 gigabytes of ram at each stage we tracked page file usage with performance monitor then opened up tasks until we noticed activity once you reach the threshold where the system starts to swap data out of bran and onto the boot drive you might not necessarily see the system slow to a crawl or anything like that but you could see a dip in performance or responsiveness if a tab or an application that you go to access has already been paged to your SSD or your hard drive so first up is chrome will be looking both at how many chrome tabs are open when windows starts using the page file and how many are open when chrome eventually becomes unusable bear in mind that not all tabs behave identically I've seen some use two gigs of RAM on their own but we chose a mix of web pages that we feel should be representative of typical browsing behavior with four gigs of ram we actually hit the page file with just five tabs open and then after 13 chrome crashed alrighty then with eight gigs we got to a respectable 25 tabs before any of them got swapped out and managed 40 before the situation went totally south with 16 gigs of ram we reached a fairly unreasonable 80 tabs open before page filing and then chrome finally crashed at around a hundred and eighty then with 32 gigs of ram we got all the way to a hundred and sixty-five tabs before paging and frankly we didn't feel like going through the actually kind of laborious process of opening and loading 350 to 400 web pages in chrome tabs just to see the program fail I mean if you want that many tabs you're kind of doing it wrong and this is coming from me so let's move then into gaming if all you're doing is playing a game I think you might actually be surprised by how little RAM you actually need Deus Ex mankind divided for example which recommends 12 gigs of RAM didn't suffer too badly even with only a single four gig stick although with that said rise of the Tomb Raider had some serious issues that were only sorted out by bumping up to eight gigs of RAM after that though performance didn't change for either of them when we jumped to 16 or 32 games so ok then 8 gigs for gamers actually maybe not I mean what if you don't painstakingly close down all of your running applications every time you launch steam for those folks we popped open our 10 tab test suite and an instance of discord to see if 8 gigs could handle it and surprisingly enough there was no difference at all with the exception of rise of the Tomb Raider that game seems to really love its ran so then depending on the game you probably won't need 16 gigs of RAM to play it but it won't give you a ton of breathing room for the future and you might need to limit your background tasks for the best experience so then what does anyone need more than 8 gigs of RAM for well I would argue that any kind of workstation is going to want at least 16 and you might be surprised to find out that even more is pretty common for those kinds of systems Alex actually has a number of Excel documents from his engineering days that believe it or not will not even open on a computer with 8 gigs of RAM and has had some simulations of fluid flow or suspension movement that crash out even with 16 gigs of RAM video editing can also be very demanding but this is heavily dependent on your workload if you're cutting together short to medium length 1080p videos 16 gigs should be plenty but the sky is the limit here if you use tools like After Effects you can expect needing 16 to be an absolute minimum and as the complexity of your project increases so does your RAM requirements our latest season of scrapyard wars for example because of how darn much footage was in the timeline immediately crashes we anything less than 64 gigs of RAM although for more information about how much RAM you need through video editing specifically you can check out our video here where we tested it with up to 128 now it should be noted that all of what I'm saying concerns system memory and not video memory which is used for loading in 3d objects and textures for your graphics cards used this is very important for games and also professional applications but is probably a discussion for a different video when I can almost guarantee we'll end with well it depends one interesting side note before we wrap up is that as we moved up from four gigs of RAM our system boot times actually got slower it was only at most a second more but this is cool if you're aware of a Windows feature called super fetch it actually makes sense super fetch tries to intelligently preload some programs into RAM so that they'll launch faster when you need them so the idea is that if you run out and buy excess memory it can still be used for something which doesn't mean though that we're saying to do that as you might have noticed Ram prices are out of control right now so our recommendation for general users and gamers is eight gigs if you're looking to scrape by and be ready to upgrade later and 16 gigs if you want to be comfortable for a while as for the workstation users out there well it depends and you know what else it depends on yeah it doesn't depend on that at all forget it course there's new light Lube fans these things look freakin incredible they have dual RGB lighting loops with 16 independent RGB LEDs in every fan that are split between two separate loops allowing for nearly endless customization the included Corsair lighting node pro enables dynamic lighting effects with other coarser links supported devices and they've got complete PWM control so they can be controlled anywhere from 600 rpm all the way up to 1500 rpm depending on whether you want them to be quieter or cool more efficiently so check them out over at the link in the video description because come on baby it's RGB you know you love it so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join