Memory Advantage or Disadvantage

[PowerHungry]

We've always been told that if you want a quick boost in performance add memory.

Now that I'm getting parts together for a second system, I sold my memory and bought Patriot Viper Extreme DDR3 3X4GB which runs like a charm. Last night, I thought I'd make sure that the second batch of the same memory was without issues, so I put it all into my current machine, thus giving me 24GB of installed memory.

I have seen no advantage what-so-ever and to the naked eye the machine runs as it did with 12GB of memory.

I guess my question is, what is too much memory?? Is there a sweet spot where you don't gain any performance beyond a certain point??

[ShadowLeaper]

For most gamers the sweet spot is 8GB. Even going from 4GB to 8GB won't see much difference in benchmarks, but subjectively games are smoother, you can use higher quality settings, level loading times are quicker, etc. You'll have less graphical anomalies as well, because the video card will be able to reserve more system memory for texture storage and such.

If you do multitasking (browsers, WMP, YouTube, etc.), that will work better as well.

[curlysir]

For most gamers the sweet spot is 8GB. Even going from 4GB to 8GB won't see much difference in benchmarks, but subjectively games are smoother, you can use higher quality settings, level loading times are quicker, etc. You'll have less graphical anomalies as well, because the video card will be able to reserve more system memory for texture storage and such.

If you do multitasking (browsers, WMP, YouTube, etc.), that will work better as well.

I agree with you, from my somewhat limited research 8GB seems to be the about the max memory that the vast majority of users will every need. 4GB is enough for most. I saw no real world difference when I went from 4GB to 8GB. Most if not all of the tests I found on this showed limited improvement in performance after 8 GB for the majority of users. This also assumes that your are using a 64 bit operation system otherwise you can't really use 4GB.

[Poci]

Nothing to date even uses 8 gigz. So 12 or 24 atm is definatly overkill.

Now as we see more 64 bit appz and games they will put the massive amounts of memory to use.