How little memory is too little?

The last time I was using 8gb ram was 4 months ago when I tried i5 2500k + rx 6600.
Game like Spiderman Miles Morales simply doesn't want to start, and there are stuttering mess when playing Ghost Recon Wildlands or Call of Duty infinity war.

IMHO the minimum ram shall be 16gb nowadays, with 8gb only for office work.
 
8gb is even getting iffy with office work, at least the way all our secretaries use their PCs. but for normal day to day, non-gaming or video work, it will get you by.
 
IMHO I believe 32 GB of system memory is the current sweet spot in 2x16 or 4x8 configs.
Currently Utilizing 44% or 14 GB+/- of available memory with two browsers open, Office Outlook 20 apps running in system tray and I don't have to sacrifice anything to make sure I'm ready to game.
I rarely exceed 65% or 20 GB+/- utilization when gaming and that with very little closed (2 monitors).
I think I could get away with 16 GB but then I'd have to tweak and tune.
At 32GB no compromises and future proof.
 
32gb of ddr4 3600 runs around $60 to $70 on constant deals. There's no excuse for not having at least that much nowadays. For ddr5 it's around $100.
 
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Spoiled, all of you. :p
 
For folks just wanting to browse and do Office stuff 6GB is as low as I'll go. If I get a customers laptop in that still only has 4GB, I'll slap in a 2GB stick of the same speed for free as I usually have a few laying around. It gives a nice little buffer. Plus the SSD I always upgrade them to...makes a difference.

But yeah I dont see 4GB gaming machines anymore. 8GB and up. I have a RTX 4090 rig sat beside me the past week that has 64GB of DDR5 6000 in it.
 
gimme 2.763TB or gimme death, hehehe :D /s

Seriously though, for all my personal & client DDR4 rigs, I won't even bother installing less than 32GB, with several having 64GB. However, since DDR5 is beginning to become available in larger & larger chips, most of them I build later this year or early next year will be 128GB-256GB...
 
I agree with what others have said. 16GB minimum for a gaming system, 8GB minimum for an office system. It's possible to get by with less on an office system if their usage is extremely basic, while someone with 50 browser tabs open on top of a bunch of other programs could easily push past 8GB. I'd say that an SSD is a requirement for pretty much any system at this point, regardless of how it's used. An SSD won't make up for lack of RAM, however, a system with an SSD will be slow but still somewhat usable once you are out of RAM. A system with a mechanical hard drive will grind to a halt the moment you run out of RAM, programs will freeze, and you'll probably have to forcibly reboot the system.
 
I don't even think 8gb is enough for office work. My work laptop chokes on itself all the time with 8gb.
 
The main thing is you have to have a SSD. Modern systems cannot run without them. I now refuse to work on a machine if it has not got a SSD. They get upgraded and then I work on them. RAM is secondary.
 
I recently bumped up a coworker's personal MacBook Pro (roughly 2011-2012 vintage) from 4 GB to 8 GB with some freebie DDR3 SO-DIMMs scored on a recent trip, because there was no way Catalina was going to be tolerable on a system with that little RAM and a spinning rust hard drive. (I had actually advocated that he set aside about $100, go to Micro Center, pick up 16 GB of DDR3 and a SATA SSD, and that'll spruce it up enough 'til he feels like getting a new laptop.)

8 GB is the bare minimum these days, I think. 16 GB if you're gaming. 32 GB is the current comfort zone for high-end gaming with some multitasking. 64 GB in my main gaming rig was just because I could since the RAM was so cheap at the time.

Meanwhile, for certain workloads, I'm sure there's someone out there who'd say that my server crammed with 768 GB of RAM is still far too little.
 
I have a machine that has 8gb of DDR3L. It should really have 16 but it works fine. I’d grab another 8 but I’m on the fence about upgrading to a newer model
 
I would never build a machine with less than 32GB, but that's been the case for years and years - even had 32GB back in the 2500K days.

Almost just threw 64GB in along with the 5800X3D upgrade, but I'm not planning to keep it for more than another year or so.

Given the trend of larger and larger modules with DDR5, I'll probably have at least 64GB in my next full rebuild.
 
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