I hope 16 gigs is good for a while.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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I have 64 and I have rarely ever used as much as 16.
I regularly use over 16-24GB of my 32 GB, and considering I just had to replace 4 8s with 2 16s, I'm honestly kinda tempted to get another pair just to have knowing the shit that's coming down the pipe.
That’s reassuring, gotta make sure I take care of mine. The pc market has been too messy the last few years.
Yeah, by the time it becomes an issue you'll be ready to upgrade anyway. There are few use cases for as much RAM as I have. I only bought it to fuck around with VM's. I'm probably skipping ddr5 and am5 so you're in good company.
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16 is minimum and 32 is recommended if you do much pc gaming, browsing, or torrenting. Things with multiple programs. A single browser and steam open. I regularly hit 16 to 20gb on mint and librewolf. I rarely never see a use past 32gb. I find that to be the sweet spot right now. Anything higher than 32 is better spent on ddr5 upgrade. Caveat being if you run some serious programs but that's overly rare even by today's software.
I have 8GB in my laptop running mint, its used for browsing, office work, 3D print slicing, and occasionally I torrent a file from it...it is absolutely no issue whatsoever and it never even breaks 4GB use unless it's actively slicing a 3D model. 16GB minimum I can agree with for gaming, but for desktop use as mentioned above you can easily get by with less.
You can run it on 8GB. Doesnt mean you won't benefit from more.
Your system outsources the memory to swap space or is memory starved and needs to unload programs.
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for desktop use as mentioned above you can easily get by with less.
Sure, as long as you're willing to deal with the performance hit of constantly swapping to disk.
Even SSD drives are a magnitude slower that any modern RAM stick, so you're adding TONS of processing time by running that little memory. And gods help you if your swap is on spinning rust....
If that was the case I wouldn't have 4GB of idle ram just sitting in my PC. There is no unloading to swap when 50% of available ram is unused.
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Aw man, i saw 32gb DDR4 for 50€ a few months ago. Now its at 90€.
Good thing is that i just dont need more ram right now.
It's about 50€/16GB over here in France. DDR5 goes for 75€ and upwards. Used is a bit cheaper, especially for the SODIMM.
That reminded me that this exists.
Wow. I wonder how well that'll work out, like stability, need to lower frequency...
Did this also happen when DDR3 was phased out?
I think DDR3 only became more expensive than DDR4 when there were no new motherboards to support them.
AI is speeding up the process of retiring DDR4 if I am not wrong.
care to explain a bit more?
AI is the culprit. Memory manufacturers prefer to use their available production capacity to make DDR5 and HBM memory. Both forms of faster memory play a role in modern (AI) systems. DDR5 is also the standard for modern computers, but HBM memory is particularly popular for AI accelerators.
Manufacturers have no motivation to increase DDR4 capacity. DDR5 and HBM5 have more customers, and manufacturers who want the legacy memory have no choice but to pay a premium.
Source: https://itdaily.com/news/business/ai-maakt-ddr4-duurder-dan-ddr5/
I've seen the claim around but I'm highly skeptical of it. DDR5 is far too slow for anything where memory bandwidth really matters, any newly produced chip that's gonna be used for AI is on HBM3 or HBM3e, or possibly GDDR6/GDDR7 if it's a GPU pulled from the consumer segment. HBM5 is still a very, very early research project and is certainly not being produced yet.
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Can confirm. I got a quote a few weeks ago and then went to buy last week and they bumped up the price about 20%.