DRAM Prices to drop even further due to trade war - could drop by 25% by years end

This was already explained earlier..................

 

I have had a couple of bad years and hence sold my ryzen 1700 setup while ago, and that was fitted with 16GB memory. As a home user and no data crunching, and also one for being so .....close an app on my pc, i never used anywhere near the amount.

Now having got out of my doom an gloom I got a ryzen 5 2600 set up, running at 4GHz ,with 2 X 4 GB team group 2400 ram, OC at 3000. I couldn't be any happier at the moment.

Not one for multi tasking , i.e gaming and browsing at the same time..... therefore do I, or do you need 16 GB?

Answers please

 

So, what's your state consumer tax and income tax? Here we have ~27% income tax. And from remaining 73% we pay 21% consumer tax.
This means that our government gets whole 40% of our money due to taxation.

In other words: To afford item valued $600 before any consumer tax on it, I have to have $1000 paycheck before income taxes.
Large portion of world has it like this or even worse.

Not for multitasking? Then you could have got yourself Gaming console for gaming. And do multimedia/browsing on some old cheap $60 notebook.

That's cheaper and better than system which can't run things in background while gaming.

 

thanks for the reply - may have confused you with my grammar. Edited what i wrote.

I do like gaming and have a rad 570 which does punch out 60fps on a 4k tv , just played my favourite game FC3. ( Just realised when I went back into settings, it was set at optimal, hence the good frame rates. Now I have it set to high settings , only 40 + fps ) Did not want to tell porky's or exaggerate.
I love the keypad and mouse set up. No way would I go console

Of course my system can run programs in the background, I just choose not to

 

Back when I still have i5@4.5GHz, I did not choose to close background applications. I had to. That's how bad modern gaming got. Eat one CPU core away and even 4C/8T will suffer. And that's real scenario for average PC user. (AV scan, browser module, webpage add, ...)
6C/6T is bare minimum today for new system. 6C/12T makes sense and is justifiable most of the time. 8C/16T is for comfort.

Similar thing can be said about RAM. 8GB works in most cases, but may suffer sometimes. 16GB is already ensuring comfortable use. But we do not get to have that sensible 12GB (unless triple channel system). I say that most of people do not need expensive fast ram. Therefore 16GB 3200MHz CL16 is good choice.

 

16GB is more than enough if you're sparse with background processes. IMO, 8GB is pretty much the bare minimum for modern gaming PCs, but requires you to be a bit frugal with your day to day usage. Meanwhile, 12GB would be my "safe minimum", where you don't have to "nickel and dime" everything you do.
16GB allows for mild multitasking.

This may be the first time I have ever strongly disagreed with you. If multitasking is the primary reason to get a gaming PC (instead of a console) then what does that say about the first several decades of PC gaming when consoles co-existed? PCs back then were terrible at multitasking, and consoles offered a substantially more affordable way to get decent graphics. Since you (as a human) can't really work and play at the same time, it wasn't really much of an issue to just simply switch between tasks. Spend your day working on the PC, spend the night gaming on it. You're still putting multiple completely different uses to the PC, you're just not running them at the same time.

Besides, what about all of the PC exclusives? Or special pricing deals? Or modding? Or a good VR experience? Or multi-display setups? Or being able to use just about any input controls you want (keyboard+mouse is a pretty big deal). There are plenty of reasons to intentionally want to play on PC, even if the PC is worse than consoles.

Not everyone wants media running in the background while they play a game. Not everyone does processor-intensive tasks like rendering, compiling, VMs, or transcoding in the background. In fact, I'd argue you shouldn't do those things while gaming, since the game is either going to slow down those tasks or increases the chances of something failing, which doesn't sound appealing.
In the event I want something like youtube playing in the background while playing a game, I actually find it more user-friendly to just use my laptop, since it has a separate display and separate controls.

 

20 years ago, you had no other way to do any kind of productivity. Laptops were not common. People had one desktop and run excel, browser. Where else could one run it? On android phone which were not even in heads of people who made it?

I wrote about it as of today's standards. 20 years ago, I would have wrote something very different. Times changes, standards changed. Technology use changed.
Today, almost everything got multitude more use than same things would have 20 years ago.

Back then, you did put game disc into PS1 and played game. At best you could wish to play music CD in there. Today, smart TV can do that + browse internet.
But they still do single thing at a time.
PC on other hand was always about one thing: <ALT>+<TAB>
Even in times we had single core CPUs, we did it a lot. My 1st laptop had single threaded Sempron. I run it with second screen. Number of things running at same time to which I paid attention and used. I remember it like yesterday:
Mirranda with IRC+ICQ, Ventrilo/TS, Winamp, browser. When Playing Lineage 2, I did run game multiple times for multiple reasons:
- More characters online to control.
- Client ready to relog other character (force unlog).

What I mean is, that PC which can do multitasking poorly is degraded to gaming console. And as you wrote, you prefer 2nd machine for other tasks. But then, is there any other difference between your main gaming PC and gaming console than keyboard/mouse and image quality (which someone with weak PC does not get to enjoy anyway)?
- - - -
I left those PC experiences you mentioned as last. Because PC capable to do those things well enough is actually capable to do multitasking easily too.
- VR/multiple screens for gaming require quite some horsepower
- modded games more often than not increase HW demands.
- As for prices, console games have good deals too.
- last thing PC really separates from console is keyboard + mouse... say hello to XBox keyboard + mouse
- Exclusivity is apparently double edged sword. Consoles have them too. They always had better exclusives. Because there is fundamental difference between reasons behind those exclusives. PC exclusive game is one made by someone who simply developed for PC without special reason. (or because it had high HW requirements) On other hand, console exclusives were more often than not paid for by owner of platform, and were made for simple reason. Persuade people to buy gaming console.

 

I understand all of that. It doesn't matter what changed, because people haven't. No matter how good you think you are at multitasking, you're not good at it. Any PC made within the past 15 years can play media in the background while playing a game, and like I said before, doing real work while you're playing a game is just simply a bad idea. So what else is left?
You could argue "it's nice being able to just leave everything open since it's faster than re-loading it" but people have done that with their PCs for decades, because having some frame drops due to your paging file swapping was more convenient than closing our your tasks and re-loading everything. Besides, modern OSes will cache everything, so load times are still very short, not to mention, SSDs getting faster.
I legit don't see any good reason to multitask in a way to warrant more than 16GB of RAM for a PC whose primary focus is gaming. If you run other tasks that demand more RAM, then obviously there's nothing wrong with getting more.
To clarify, I don't see a [big] problem in a PC used for both gaming and work, I just don't see point in running both simultaneously.

Back in the single-core days, alt+tabbing was very clunky, especially if you had low RAM or a game that would get sudden rendering issues as a result. Sometimes, a game would crash from it. Nowadays, alt+tabbing isn't so difficult, but pulling out your phone, a tablet, or a laptop is still faster and easier. Most people who have a gaming PC have at least 1 of those other devices with similar task capabilities.

Yes: all the other benefits I mentioned, gaming-focused or otherwise.
And again, just because a PC isn't fit for multitasking, that doesn't mean it isn't fit for doing real work. Like I said before, you can just alternate between tasks. A gaming console is only good for medium-detail games and media playback - that's it. A gaming PC can do a lot more than just those 2 things, but, that doesn't mean it should be capable of doing all of those things at the same time.
For the sake of argument, let's say you don't do anything work related that's very CPU and time sensitive. You can either spend extra money building your PC to run those tasks and games at the same time (even though you, as a human, aren't efficiently handling both), or, you can save money on weaker hardware and just run them one at a time, where you're given undivided attention. If you have a separate laptop, you can also use that to offload some of your work.

Understood, but my point is multitasking isn't the reason to prefer a gaming PC over a console. The way you phrased yourself made it seem like "well if you aren't planning on multitasking then why get a gaming PC?" which is fundamentally what I disagree with.
I thought I actually mentioned Xbox with keyboard+mouse but I guess I deleted that. But, that has pretty limited support, and I figure most XB1 owners aren't going to bother. One of the bigger differences between a PC and a console is most console players prefer to sit in front of a TV in a livingroom, whereas most PCs are at a desk. Of course, there are exceptions to both, but I'm talking about the general populous here.

I wouldn't say they always have better exclusives. They have a higher quantity of better exclusives, but it really depends on what you're into. Regardless though, PCs have emulators. You might not get those console exclusives immediately, but probably eventually.
From what I've found most [good] PC exclusives require keyboard+mouse. Any time such a game gets a console port, it was often very poorly rated.
Most people I know who care about exclusives get multiple systems. I know someone who has every major system (including VR) except the Switch.

 

The difference is quite stunning. I bought a pair of Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 3000 RAM almost a year ago for $226 CAD. Today, it's selling for $113 - literally half. Great time for PC builders, but I can't help but feel that I've been swindled.

I also use a separate machine for streaming media while gaming, but that's only because of the way Windows handles inputs - input something on another monitor (I have a touch monitor alongside my gaming monitors) and it will change the focus and switch out of the game (in this sense, it's little different than alt-tabbing). If Windows could handle multiple inputs without switching out of the game then I would use a single system for everything.

In general, I expect my PC to multitask efficiently and see this as one of the main benefits of using a PC over something like a console. This is also one of the reasons why I like CPUs with many cores/threads (aside from the computing power).

 

That's perfectly fine. I'm not saying people shouldn't have the expectations for their PCs to multitask well; my work PC has a dozen different programs running all at the same time 24/7 (albeit, most of them are idle tasks). Multitasking is also a benefit of having a gaming PC.

My point is a PC that isn't good at multitasking is not a good reason to say "just get a console".

 

Good debate so far - But as I do not multitask whilst gaming, is 8 GB enough? The reason I got 8 GB, it allowed me to use funds elsewhere . i.e my VGA card.

Update
I just done a experiment myself :

Guru3D front page -5 game trailers playing , word open, vlc playing a film , about 15 websites open aida64 , cpuz, .....

Memory used 38%

That is not even half of it. In my case 16 GB not needed

 

Yes, 8GB is enough, if you do stuff to help maximize your limited RAM, such as:
* Shut down any programs you're not actively paying attention to (such as a web browser or other DRMs not needed for the game)
* Disable Windows services you probably don't/won't use during a game
* Shut down 3rd party services like malware protection or cloud syncing
* Give yourself several GB of a paging file
It is worth pointing out that with 8GB, your load times will increase, because you will have dramatically decreased (maybe even eliminated) your buffer, and your paging file is going to be working overtime.

Also depending on the GPU you get and the resolution you play on, you should also lower texture details in some games. Most modern games have textures optimized for 1440p or higher. If you play games at 1080p, you can't perceive any texture difference unless you're pressing your face directly up to a wall. If your GPU has limited RAM (like 6GB or less), those high-res textures will soak up your VRAM real fast, at which point your system memory will be used to pick up the slack.
EDIT:
That being said, if you are intending to play at 1440p or higher, you might want to opt for 16GB anyway, just to be safe.

 

Depends what games you use some latest aaa games cutting it really close with 8gb i i noticed when you have 8gb ram normally at about 7.3-7.4 gb all hell start breaking loose freezes and hangups , in my opinion 8gb is enough but to add another 8gb will be what ? 40-50 usd / euro the cpu will last you a while and the gpu depends on your demands in detail levels .

Anyway personally the price of ram is low enough that i would spend that kind of money for the peace of mind and to make sure till my pc is getting completely replaced this is the last time i have to deal with ram.

 

Just gonna post this here for those interested since it may help shed some light on current ram price trends(EU market) for various different kits.

Had some time to kill yesterday so I did a bit of price hunting/checking and in light of recent news from DRAMeXchange expecting even further decline I also threw YoY numbers taken from Amazon EU.

Prices shown are either taken from Amazon EU or from a couple other reputable e-shops. Some prices may vary depending where one shops but I believe in general they are a fair representative regarding current pricing of each product.

3000MT/s
https://i.**********/h4NwXmLR/best-3000-MHz.png

3200MT/shttps://i.**********/MHL9RCMY/best-3200-MHz.png

 

3600MT/s
https://i.**********/yxxfD1dd/best-3600-MHz.png

4000/4133/4266MT/s
https://i.**********/Fzz0MGRY/best-4000-4266-MHz.png

 

Nice chart Koniakki^...Thanks!