 How much RAM should I get for my computer? So many people ask the question and the only answer they can get from the in-the-know techies, and I mean we've even done it here before, is usually, well, how much are you planning to use? Get that much. Which is only useful if you know how much your workload requires. For gamers, it's relatively simple. There's a number on the back of the box, excuse me, a digital information page because physical media, but for content creators, and our main focus is going to be on Adobe Creative Cloud because that's what we use here, between Adobe's own system requirements and white papers and the numerous professionals on the message boards around the web, there's no solid answer. All we really hear is you need multiple fast storage locations, more memory is good, faster processors with more cores are good, and video cards with like speed and memory capacity are good. This has been the ongoing guidance with seemingly no consideration for recent technological changes in the shifting bottlenecks within PCs and workstations for years. So as part of the process of designing the workstations for our editors to find the optimal cost to performance compromise for a given workload, I asked Edzel to run some benchmarks in Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop, all the Creative Cloud 2014 versions to investigate the effect of more CPU cores, more RAM up to 128 gigs, and burying storage solutions. Now I was half expecting scraps of paper with notes scribbled on them so that we could configure our workstations, but what I actually got was a very detailed summary with useful charts that will publish separately on the Linus Tech Tips site in the link in the video description for folks who want to read it, but for those of you who prefer videos, well we made a video about it too, so watch on. Oh, and mash that subscribe button if you haven't already, because our X99 overclocking guide, another great way of squeezing performance out of your hardware, will be coming soon. Corsair Gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB key switches for 16.8 million color per key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization. Click now to learn more. I'll start by introducing the test bench. It's Edzel's 12 core Xeon E5 2697 based workstation with the same Asus X79 Deluxe motherboard that we use in all of our editing rigs, 2G Force GTX Titans for accelerating 3D rendering, a Cooler Master 1200 watt modular power supply, a Kingston 240 gig SSD, and a WD 1 terabyte velociraptor for storage, and normally 64 gigs of HyperX quad channel RAM, but to properly investigate the effects of memory on performance, we needed more RAM, so we used eight 16 gig sticks of intelligent memory ECC RAM. Huge thanks to Memphis by the way for providing this to us for testing, giving us a whopping 128 gigs of RAM to either allocate to programs or use as a RAM disk to see if we could use excess memory in the system to alleviate storage bottlenecks. So our Premiere Pro investigation started with allocating memory to the program via the preferences menu and rendering out projects at 1080p and 4k resolution with x264. We used x264 because it was better optimized for multi-core processors, which inherently utilizes more memory. Now remember that when we allocate memory to Premiere, that doesn't mean that's the amount of RAM in the system, but rather how much of what's in the system we can afford to allocate purely to Premiere. So at 1080p we found that if you don't want to multitask on your machine while rendering, 8 gigs of system memory is likely to be fine. There was no benefit to more RAM beyond our lowest tested 6 gig allocation. At 4k though, the story changes somewhat. Our RAD project render times improved by 7% when we went from 6 gigs to 24 gigs of allocated memory, flattening out significantly after that, demonstrating that the conventional wisdom of more RAM doesn't really help beyond a certain point continues to hold true. But where that certain point is will depend on the type of projects you're working on, and we found that our 4k ProRes renders benefited from up to 64 gigs of RAM on Windows 8, but not beyond. For larger, longer projects like movies, you might end up needing more memory to keep things running smoothly while editing, but render times still probably won't benefit much. Now since the usefulness of more RAM falls off a cliff past 64 gigs, that left us with, ha, another 64 gigs of RAM to play around with in the system. So we decided to see if we could utilize a RAM disk as a scratch disk, and... Okay, yeah. Faster storage here doesn't actually do much, sort of. Render times aren't improved, but a separate physical drive for a scratch disk, whether it's RAM or SSD, especially SSD versus slower hard drives, does improve the overall perceived system performance with more responsive playback, faster file importing, and faster project opening being some of the most noticeable benefits. Moving on to After Effects, our investigation changed somewhat to include both RAM allocation and CPU core scaling, since we couldn't find much information about either of these topics. RAM allocation in multiprocessor rendering mode is a particularly confusing thing, because Adobe allows anywhere from 1 gig to 6 gigs, with the caveat being that if you have too many cores, for the amount of RAM that you're trying to allocate per core in your system, let's say you have a quad-core CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and then you go and try and allocate 6 gigs per core, to a total of 24 gigs, derp, the program supposedly simply won't use all of your cores in this case, and on top of that it treats logical processors, or hyper-threaded cores, the same as physical ones, so finding the balance here then is key. The largest performance improvement from additional RAM allocation was going from 1 gig per core to 2 gigs per core, so, in theory then, we should ensure that we have at least 48 gigs of RAM for a 12-core hyper-threaded After Effects workstation, but beyond that, the law of diminishing returns should hit us pretty hard. But then, we noticed an interesting thing here, and that was that even though our 6 gigs per core allocation should have required 144 gigs of system RAM, limiting us to 19 of our 24 threads theoretically, CPU utilization still hovered around 99% even in this case. So maybe hyper-threaded cores really aren't affecting performance much, which led us to our investigation into CPU cores and After Effects performance. We tackled this in two different ways. First, by using CPU scheduling to isolate our real cores, validating our hypothesis that hyper-threading isn't really doing a whole lot in this case, and then by disabling cores manually within the computer's UEFI BIOS to see how performance is affected by more actual physical cores. So in that case, performance improvements from having more horses pulling the cart were immediately noticeable, and while not linear, still demonstrated excellent scaling. Now, you might think then, what is the point of the CPU scheduling setting then? Why even bother with it? Well, Edsel found that reserving CPU cores, even though CPU usage by the system didn't change much, prevented After Effects from being over-scheduled and lagging out the system. And we'll wrap things up in Photoshop, where the objective was to determine how much memory we would need for manipulating and resizing very large images on a beefy workstation like this one. And the answer is, well, really not a heck of a lot. While 4 gigs of RAM resulted in much lower performance than 8 or more, beyond 8 gigs, we didn't observe much of a difference. But bear in mind that this will greatly depend on the size of your project and the history state setting. So the project we used took 4.75 gigs of memory, or scratch disk, and the size of the project then, of course, greatly affects the memory usage of your actions. So in our case, while it's not something we can easily benchmark, we did find that our SSD's performance was a bit of a bottleneck while opening projects or performing certain actions, things we would have assumed Adobe would try to do in memory first rather than relying on scratch. So we did find that creating a RAM disk as the scratch disk could improve the user experience by forcing Photoshop to write to RAM instead of an SSD, but ultimately, for raw performance, it's just going to come down to how big is your project and how much of it sits in memory. So that same old conclusion, which I guess leads us to the rest of the conclusion. In the last few years, the general guidelines, lots of processing cores, lots of RAM and fast storage haven't really changed, and they didn't change. But I still hope that this video, for Adobe creators anyway, helped to clarify which of these things might have a bigger impact on them personally. 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So if you're serious about anime and want to binge on some of the biggest shows from Japan, head over to that link in the video description and start watching today. Guys, like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it just sucked, and leave a comment below letting us know. Actually, I really want to hear what you guys thought of this video. It's a little bit of a departure from our usual style, a little bit more hardcore content creation as opposed to consumer. Thanks for watching, guys. Oh yeah, check out the link in the video description if you want to support us and help us make videos. You can give us a monthly contribution, buy a cool t-shirt like this one, or just change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code embedded in it so we get a small kickback whenever you buy more memory or CPU cores or faster storage. Thanks for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe.