Why 8GB + ??

Folks, I am about to buy my next ultrabook and considering a 4gb version. The Dell XPS 13...

Reason being I realize that when I am on the go I only perform very light gaming which this unit would be capable of:

Archeage Online / World of Warcraft
Dota 2
CS GO
Starcraft
ETc.

Anyways what I want to find out, is why would I even want 4gb + for an ultra book?

Also why more than 8gb for a gaming pc? I have a I5 4690k 780ti SLI 8gb gaming machine that does 4k+ gaming no problem. Never ran into an issue...

Can someone tell me honestly? I am just trying to understand, when I have never seen a use case requiring tons of ram.

Maybe because I don't photo edit?

For business I just use excel, word processors, pdf files, etc.

I also am the type of guy who has a million windows open in chrome, even of my 4gb surface pro with no issues.....

 

Are you talking about buying the Dell XPS 13 with 4GB RAM or 4GB VRAM?

I'd say 4GB is not quite enough RAM for smoothly running win8, multiple browser tabs, and 64-bit applications like Excel, Outlook (now many games are now 64-bit as well).

 

For purely gaming, you are right. 4GB for those games you play is more than enough.

 

If you've never run into a problem with 8GB on a gaming PC, you don't do very much with your gaming PC other than game. I consistently use 5-7GB of RAM without even launching a game; simply because of the amount of stuff I have open all the time.

In short, it's up to you and how you use your machine. The way I use mine? 4GB is a joke. 8GB is "minimum" for me. 16GB is "breathing room" and 32GB would be "highest I'd go for now".

 

Yeh 4gb is cutting it a bit fine. Even just using Chrome can eat a fair chunk of it.

 

4gb is not enough. Take the 8gb for sure.

 

So guys I appreciate the feedback I have a few responses below:

1) Right now I am typing on surface Pro laptop i5 with 4gb of ram. I currently have google chrome with 4 tabs open, Skype with my GF talking to me, Black berry link, Ms Excel, and vmware client all open. I am using only 2.5meg of ram.

2) My gaming pc I use it for work as well, and I am notorious for using tons of apps at once. Vmware, excel, steam, 15+ chrome tabs, etc. I have never had problems.

Can anyone point to some benchmarks proving more than 4gb is required?

It's just in my experience people always opt for more ram without truly needing it. It's kinda like I7 for gaming...

I am not saying I am right, I am just hoping someone can prove me wrong. So I make the right choice and buy a 8b+ laptop. Part of my other issue is the 8b+ models of XPS 13 all have QHD. I do not want a QHD I want a FHD with better battery life.

IMO QHD touch screens are such a fad. I have a 27 inch 4k monitor but that's actually worth it as it's 27 inches... not 13...

 

Well you are not wrong.

I also survive with 4GB of RAM. I have dropbox, postgres, apache2, tomcat6, skype, vlc, and chromium with 8 tabs running and I am at 50% used by programs and 20% cached.
I can reach 20 tabs with youtube videos and streaming and still be around 70-80% use by programs. I also occasionally run Windows 7 pro in VirtualBox where I have it configured with 1GB of RAM.

However, it just happened that earlier I wanted to run a script of mine on a medium to big graph to get some experimental results, and it ate away around 3GB of RAM, so I had to close chromium.
Also in the past whenever I would do some light bench-marking I would free up some RAM.

It is not the end of the world, but my next laptop will be 8GB of RAM just to have some breathing room. I think it would be a good idea for you too.

 

Sometimes it pays to have a bit more breathing room than you require at the moment. If you plan to keep your system for a while then you may find over time that the applications you currently use may become more memory intensive due to new updates and added features.

With DDR4 starting to come into fray I would consider upgrading sooner (at its cheapest point) rather than later as it will become quite expensive once DDR3 modules phases out from mainstream.

As an example I have a notebook that uses DDR2 modules, I bought 2x 4GB DDR2 modules for £60 back in the day. If I was to buy them at today's price then it would've cost me £190 so the price inflation is quite huge, I could actually sell the modules now for considerable profit but this notebook have sentimental value to me so it's a keeper!

 

Even though 4GBs should be enough for those games, I would still go with 8GBs of RAM, future proof and all, you know.