I upgraded my laptop from 6GB to 16GB of RAM about 3 months ago (having 1GB VRAM). What I can say for sure is that 6GB was becoming too little for everyday tasks having Chrome with 2-3 tabs, Steam, Excel and Word filling up the whole memory with noticeable lag when switching web tabs or scrolling through content-rich pages.
With upgrade to am4 i decided to go with 32GB. On am3 i had 16GB which at time it was overkill but this overkill allowed me to extend am3's life a lot. After spending some time with am4's 32GB i can say i haven't faced yet any game exceeding 12GB of ram usage/allocation at any, even barely, playable settings. I tried about 30-40 games so far and none exceeded 16GB of ram at any settings. What do i do with spare ram? Multitasking like having in background working applications and in case of older or just fitting with size games i put them into 16-22GB ramdisk. Crysis series is extremely improving when loaded from ramdisk, especially minimum fps is way higher. I'm going to upload example comparisons soon on my yt channel. To test just ram usage i decided to run a game which i find to be the most ram consuming: rise of the tomb raider. Pushed everything to max, 4k, ssaa x4 and during benchmark at times ram utilization was peaking a bit over 14GB. Definitely unplayable settings for most pc configurations.
I have 12GB in triple channel mode and have never seen it maxed out, evenm when gaming with a movie playing in the bacground and Firefox open with a few tabs etc. All this 32GB opf RAM stuff is nice (if you can fill it) - I'm tempted to fill the other 3 channels with 3x4GB sticks for 24GB but wont be doing that for a bit as looking to upgrade my Xeon to an Ivybridge Xxeon 6 core before the RAM upgrade. If you want cheap RAM then CEX is great for it, DDR4 2666-3200 is £10-15 for 4GB sticks! (CEX test the RAM before they buy it off people and I've never had a bad stick from them) (they have no heat spreaders but you can buy them with RGB if you want that, or just plain nice looking heatspreaders from eBay.
Just cause software got allocated memory for it, doesn't mean it uses it. Chrome can consume 30GB of memory cause it's FREE, doesn't mean it actually uses all of it.
uh, except its actually using it. and if its not actually using it, its unavailable to other applications because memory fragmentation sucks.
8GB - Office work and gaming e.g older titles... 16GB - 80% Gaming on the new titles and few content creation etc photoshop video editing (Standard Recommendation) 32GB - I recommend this now because RAM prices have dropped considerably Most gamers need 16gb and as for 32gb is because of prices have dropped or ppl need for virtual stuff and whats not.
I think 8gb is way more than enough, unless you're doing something highly memory intensive. Yea, browsers are bloated these days, but you really only need one page open at a time. No really. That's it. 4gb is good for the average non-gamer, non-power user. And the only reason is because Win10 is a fat bloated pig. If you're running Linux you'd only need like 512mbs.
For demanding games and applications on today's digital world i believe 16gb is the norm. For extremely high demanding games in 4k uhd HDR and moded and the absolutely most demanding applications 32gb is the norm' I have tested some games on 2x4gb = 8gb of Ram and even at 1080p they do not run well , but when installing 2x8gb = 16gb of Ram ran normally. In my opinion year 2019 and looking into future proof gaming rigs , get as much ram as you can afford to last you the next 3~5 years if you are keeping your same motherboard/cpu combo. Right now is the best time to upgrade Ram as it has hit a point where it does makes sense to buy more Ram based on the cheap prices right now at this exact point in time. Example: I paid 2 years ago $289US Dollars for a fast 2x8GB Flare X DDR4-3200Mhz kit 16GB 14-14-14-34-1T ram for my first Ryzen set up am4 mobo. Right now you can get a fast 2x16GB G.Skill DDR4-3000Mhz kit 32GB 16-18-18-38 1T for as low as $159US Dollars. I know this Ram can be tweaked and overclock to DDR4-3200Mhz with tight timings no problem since is based on the same Hynix MFR as the other more expensive 32GB kits DDR4-3000Mhz Cas 16 kits , knowledge is power ! https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820232418
I just had a windows update and I'm seeing Chrome only using 800mb with 7 tabs open. That is weird, Chrome would often use well over 2gb of ram last time I checked. Not saying it's the windows update, but I can't remember the last time Chrome used less than 2gb of ram on my rig. Weird.
