RAM - How Much is Enough!!

Gandalf

Gandalf

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Andy
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Hi Guys,

Looking for some advice please.

I am looking at a purchasing a new desktop PC, I am not a gamer so don't need an all singing all dancing machine. I was looking at something with a 2TB Hard Drive, possibly dedicated graphics card and I've heard about SSD drives although I know nothing about them or how they work. The main question is how much RAM is the norm these days, 8gb 12gb or 16gb. Can anyone advise? I will be using the latest Microsoft Office Suite along with the latest Lightroom and Photoshop.

Cheers

Andy
 
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Gandalf said:
Hi Guys,

Looking for some advice please.

I am looking at a purchasing a new desktop PC, I am not a gamer so don't need an all singing all dancing machine. I was looking at something with a 2TB Hard Drive, possibly dedicated graphics card and I've heard about SSD drives although I know nothing about them or how they work. The main question is how much RAM is the norm these days, 8gb 12gb or 16gb. Can anyone advise? I will be using the latest Microsoft Office Suite along with the latest Lightroom and Photoshop.

Cheers

Andy
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I am in the same boat as yourself in that I know little about PC's, lucky for me though, I have a 21 year old son, who is completing his degree in PC's. In my opinion, you can never have too much ram! The SSD drives are very expensive, but very robust. my son purchased a SSD drive for his system, what you do is use the SSD drive for your windows, or operating system, then use the computer hard drive for storage. This will give you extra fast boot-up times for you pc and the operating system runs faster with less clog up on the the SSD drive
 
8GB is a minimum, 16GB recommended for image processing.

If you can afford a larger SSD to store image files on too then there are speed advantages - a 1TB SSD can sometimes be had for £150 these days.
 
Carlh said:
You can never have enough
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•
I don't agree with this statement but…
ancient_mariner said:
8GB is a minimum, 16GB recommended for image processing.
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I agree with this.

16GB should be enough (in my pro operation anyway)
but one won't get too much as it will disturb nothing but
your wallet!
 
Ssd drive will be a massive benefit as data retrieval is considerably faster. If going for 16gb ram, the addition of an Ssd will be a great compliment.

I have one that I use to work on images and they are then moved to a 'regular' drive once I have finished editing. This works for me.

I got a 240gb ssd as it was a good compromise for value and speed. My regular hard drive is 500gb, and I have a much larger Nas for backups.
 
a beefy graphics card will also help (especially with photoshop as it can use graphic acceleration to speed up the process).

I have 16gb but I could do with 32GB to be honest as I sometimes tend to open up maybe 60 or 70 raw files in one go and 3 virtual machines, email and other apps (as I do other things as well) on multiple screens - so go as much as your "needs" dictate (and wallet of course). Its best to go as big as you can to start with rather than find that you're underpowered later on and throwing away sticks of memory because you've run out of slots to replace those sticks with larger capacity one's. SSD is good though dont store important data on there, they are not resilient as normal hard-drives when it comes to read/writes (as I have found out with 200GB of SQL databases and LOTS of read/writing......).
 
16gb I would say is the current sweet spot for performance v price. You can get away with 8gb but will more than likely notice a small improvement with 16gb but unless you are hammer the pc then 32gb is less useful. As others have said an SSD for the operating system plus lightroom and hdd for storage will give the best bang for the bucks to start with. I did have a play about with memory previous and the post is here
 
Can only agree with what has been said. A fast SSD will be a big boost, From what I understand if you have 2 SSD's and use one for the OS and the other to store your Lightroom catalog that too will boost performance.
 
Surely the only correct answer is that if your system is paging to disk then you need more. And that wholly depends on what you do with it.

For me most of my virtual machines can do with just 1gb or 2gb ram. So I can have 3 or 4 and still have a stable and fast system with just 8gb. But if want a gui desktop in those machines I rapidly run out of steam.

For the OP 8GB is likely to be sufficient. Just pop it in in such a way that if you notice the system paging to disk you can easily upgrade it.
 
Carlh said:
You can never have enough. Fill that board with everything you can afford (y)
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My main PC has 16GB but task manager shows it rarely uses more than 10GB.
Something else will hold it back, in my case the CPU when doing serious work e.g. rendering video.
 
Aim for 16GB if you can, 8GB is absolute minimal.

8GB is the current optimum, but what's the point of spending money for the current optimum? We are still in the progress of having more and more applications switch to 64bit, more and more programs will be able to use more than 2GB (32bit application limit). Today's optimum will soon be outdated in a few years. RAM are so cheap nowadays, there's no reason to Not buy one step above optimum.

DDR3 price at the moment is at its cheapest. We are moving to DDR4, currently both cost similar. In a year or so time, DDR3 prices will go up as supply switch to producing DDR4. Try to buy DDR2 a few years after the tipping point and you had to pay through the nose for the slower RAM. Now is the perfect time to buy DDR3!



Having said all that, it all depends on OP's current system configuration. If it's 2x2GB sticks making up 4GB, I think a simple 2x4GB kit purchase would make more financial sense to make 12GB. No point throwing away perfectly good hardware. I've always mix and matched RAM sticks, never had any problem.
 
i would say 16gb is fine, budget for a fantastic graphics card like a GTX970i and the it will also play games like a trojan :-)
 
sbowler579 said:
Interesting READ.
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that's some very specific testing.

if you have Photoshop and Lightroom CC open together with some reasonable size edits you can easily chew thorough 12+Gb.

id agree that for having single apps open then performance may not be noticeable going from 8 to 16. but id rather have 16 with room for overhead than have 8 and end up paging/scratching to disk (even on SSD).
 
neil_g said:
that's some very specific testing.

if you have Photoshop and Lightroom CC open together with some reasonable size edits you can easily chew thorough 12+Gb.

id agree that for having single apps open then performance may not be noticeable going from 8 to 16. but id rather have 16 with room for overhead than have 8 and end up paging/scratching to disk (even on SSD).
Click to expand...

You shouldn't have much problem with this Build in running just about anything:)(y)
 
I'd only use anywhere near 16GB RAM when batching multiple images through Photoshop.
I could manage around ~12-20 12MP .PSDs with multiple layers and LightRoom running in the background.

I used to keep Dropbox on manual startup. I'd refuse to install any software I didn't need on my photo editing PC - particularly Spotify, Teamviewer iTunes etc. ... the services and memory-resident programs that these types of apps rely on silently leech memory.

I suppose my point is, unless you are editing 32MP images or batching up edits, 8GB should be enough and 12GB will be comfortable.
 
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Desktop has 8GB and sits using about half of it with normal apps (browsers, mail client, "office" etc). In the 5+ years since I built it I've never run into a "oh dear, paging to disk now" situation. However I don't transcode video or edit multiple images simultaneously.

My VMs run on a separate bare metal ESXi server with 32GB, I don't want servers hanging off a hosted hypervisor on the desktop.
 
neil_g said:
that's some very specific testing.

if you have Photoshop and Lightroom CC open together with some reasonable size edits you can easily chew thorough 12+Gb.

id agree that for having single apps open then performance may not be noticeable going from 8 to 16. but id rather have 16 with room for overhead than have 8 and end up paging/scratching to disk (even on SSD).
Click to expand...

This +1

I often edit on my older PC (still a high spec i7 but with 12gb ram) which is connected to my TV as a media PC.

Typically I'll have half a dozen web pages open and Outlook. If I also have LR and PS open I'll sometimes get a warning from Windows telling me I'm running out of memory and to close LR.

This doesn't happen that often and I'm working with quite large RAW files (just under 50mb each) but it is annoying when it does happen. My main rig has 32gb. I often have LR, PS, Illustrator, Bridge and Prem Pro open and running at the same time over 3 screens. Never a slow down.

If I were building a PC today (without going OTT) for photo editing, I'd fit 16gb, ideally using 2 slots on a 4 slot board for future upgrade if needed.
 
I've got 16Gb, and last week got an out of memory error when editing in Lightroom with nothing else open, but I expect there are still memory leaks in the latest version of Lightroom.
 
The System i'm looking at is Intel i7, 16gb Ram, 3tb Hard Drive, 4gb Dedicated graphics card from HP. This should satisfy my needs, around the £800 mark.
 
JohnStewart said:
I've got 16Gb, and last week got an out of memory error when editing in Lightroom with nothing else open, but I expect there are still memory leaks in the latest version of Lightroom.
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Ha.
You might have "nothing else open" but there'll be a zillion background processes running... can't squarely blame Lightroom without a bit of investigation ;)
 
afasoas said:
Ha.
You might have "nothing else open" but there'll be a zillion background processes running... can't squarely blame Lightroom without a bit of investigation ;)
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The only app was Lightroom, but there were the usual processes running in the background, but I do trim down the program and services that run on start-up every 6 months or so. Instead of working from start to finish through a batch of photos, I was working from the latest towards the earlier in the catalogue quite quickly when I got the error, but it didn't slow down dramatically like the previous minor version. Opened task manager and used almost all of the available memory. Quit Lightroom and memory usage drops back down to about 2 - 2.5Gb.
 
JohnStewart said:
The only app was Lightroom, but there were the usual processes running in the background, but I do trim down the program and services that run on start-up every 6 months or so. Instead of working from start to finish through a batch of photos, I was working from the latest towards the earlier in the catalogue quite quickly when I got the error, but it didn't slow down dramatically like the previous minor version. Opened task manager and used almost all of the available memory. Quit Lightroom and memory usage drops back down to about 2 - 2.5Gb.
Click to expand...
Try renaming your video cache folder in LR. There was a nasty memory leak on some versions
 
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