(Not Quite) For Backers Only: System Specs

This is telling me people are buying sh*t tons of retail PCs. Given the amount of people with 6-8gb of RAM on their 64 bit systems. How much do you want to bet that most of those people still have DDR2 RAM.

8GB on x64 seems pretty reasonable to me

Usually, retail companies will add sh*t tons of (slow) RAM to jack up prices and make people believe their systems are better. 4gb is more than enough for any of my needs. Right now, I need an SSD, NOT more RAM.

That's a pretty far fetched reasoning. Most people who build up their own gaming machine probably have 8GB+ by now as well.

I built mine with 4gb, and to this day, I have not been able to use more than 2.5 of it at once. And that was while installing ArmA 2, which is gigantic. Nothing I could possibly do, playing battlefield and WoT simultaneously even, could get past 2.5 gb. I could break it by playing 30 youtube videos at once, because chrome eats RAM like nothing else (even more than battlefield).

I can easily reach my 8 gigs. During normal function I use 4.5 gigs. I like having lots of stuff opened at the same time, saves lots of time and the excess ram that accumulates doesn't bother the performance of the pc.

I'd say 8gb is optimal if you want a modern pc. Of course if you have 4GB, the pc will use just enough to properly work but if you had 8GB, the pc would use more and it would be slightly faster cause it would have more space to work with.

So in my case, if I had 4GB I would probably sit at 3GB the entire time simply cause pcs are designed that way. Ram is cheap so anyone can get 8GB easily. 16GB and more is useless for a home pc though, unless you like virtual machines.

Where are the results?

EDIT nvm found it :roll:

What the hell do you do that requires 4.5gb of RAM? 8GB is NOT cheap for my type of RAM, it costs about $40 just for 4.

Cheap is a relative term so it probably isn't worth debating what constitutes 'cheap'. That said most people go for volume rather than speed when buying RAM and as far as components go in a computer it tends to be one of the cheaper components.

There are a lot of reasons why someone might use a lot of RAM. photo editing or video editing being two examples. CAD work or animation/ modelling being less common activities. I am just browsing the net with a music player and a friends masters thesis open for editing (yes I'm procrastinating for a few minutes) and my computer is listing roughly 2 and a half GB of RAM in use so at a glance I would not think it a stretch to see someone using 4.5gb.

Why does having a higher average RAM than you presently think optimal suggest that these people are all buying retail?

In my past home business days I could use 14GB+ of RAM no problem. As a former freelance business programmer. These other use cases can also stress your RAM pretty well:
- Virtual machines
- 3D rendering
- Multimedia processing
- Scientific simulations

A gamer or office user doesn't really have a chance of using that much RAM. Unless you do the multi-instance exploit in multiplayer games (works well with Borderlands 1 for example): run several instances of a game. One will be the host, other will be clients.

However 4GB RAM may not be enough when using a 64bit OS because of how compilers and memory allocation works. In general (that means it is more complicated than that in reality) you will end up with 64bit space taken on a 64bit OS and 32bit space taken on a 32bit OS for a pointer. With actual variable values it is kind of more complicated than that.

That's windows using your 2.5gb of RAM, open up a game, and it'll suck a lot of that away, thus still using 2.5gb, but allocating more for the games.

I am at 2,75GB right now with a browser, thunderbird and a bit of random stuff. Let me start SC2 and watch a replay... 4,01GB.
Sure if I only had 4GB and virtual memory enabled it would still "work". But it would slow the system down horribly. I can remember times where after a big 4v4 in FA my computer would take 30s+ to close the game while showing heavy activity on the HDD. With lots of Ram those days are gone. No need to go back to them ^^

Done! I seemed to fit in somewhat with the crowd so hopefully I'll be able to play.

Thats a lot of window users...

That is somewhat how I view it. Windows loads up RAM because it is precaching frequently used software. If I can have a set up where windows doesn't have to swap that out to load in additional applications/files then that is a better situation. Now obviously it will get to a point where it is silly and there is diminishing returns on increasing the amount of RAM but there has always been the thinking that no one needs more than x amount of y and whilst that may be true in future I don't think we are there just yet. There were people a few years back who thought that no one needed more than 2gb of ram, or 1gb, or 512mb. If the average amount of RAM in a system goes up then developers might just start developing their products to take advantage of it. I don't see an issue with people having more RAM or it being an indicator that people purchased a whole desktop retail.

Although it would be interesting to see the break down between retail and DIY. When CIG's Star Citizen sent out their hardware survey it queried a few non technical questions of that nature.

Never happens to me, I use windows 7, got that great RAM management.

Same here. I actually got a little giddy a few livestreams ago when they mentioned they were playing on a comp with a GTX660, since I have the Ti version.

As for ram, I run a 64 bit OS with 4x2G sticks. Idle with nothing open is 21% usage. Haveing 5-6GB available ram just feels GREAT! I have something like 7 fans total as well. Even after a couple of hours of BF3-on-almost-ultra play my system still sits at 34-35 degrees, with my gpu at maybe 50-60 (idle is 32).

An idle 5-6gb of RAM is not good, it's extra RAM. It isn't being used, and it likely never will be.

Technology can often outstrip software's demand for it. The way I see it is that it is better than the alternative. I would rather it this way than have applications always hungry for the hardware resources that the average Joe doesn't possess.

Once again, there have always been those who argue that people will never need more than x amount of y. It may be true within a given time frame but I cannot see it remaining true going forward. In addition infuscoletum was referring to their system at idle with nothing open, if they were using most of their RAM at idle it would be somewhat concerning.