 The original inspiration for this video came when Alex craftily turned the surface laptop he'd just finished writing the review for into his daily driver and realized that our model unfortunately only has 8 gigs of RAM with no way to upgrade it. But does that matter? Well, the commonly held wisdom for years has been that unless you're some kind of power user, 8 gigs ought to be enough for everyone. Well, hold on. With Windows 10 and Chrome devouring memory like Kobayashi at a hot dog eating contest, we've been regularly seeing memory usage over 20 gigs just from web browsing on our writing workstations. So, we started an investigation. EK Water Blocks' MLC Phoenix lineup is designed around quick disconnect couplings and brings a modular approach to connecting and expanding your water cooling loop. Learn more at the link below. So our testing rig has a Core i7-7700K, a GTX 1080 Ti, and a 1TB SATA SSD. Then we equipped it with 4, 8, 16, or 32 gigabytes of RAM. At each stage, we tracked page file usage with performance monitor, then opened up tasks until we noticed activity. Once you reach the threshold where the system starts to swap data out of RAM and onto the boot drive, you might not necessarily see the system slow to a crawl or anything like that, but you could see a dip in performance or responsiveness if a tab or an application that you go to access has already been paged to your SSD or your hard drive. So first up is Chrome. We'll be looking both at how many Chrome tabs are open when Windows starts using the page file, and how many are open when Chrome eventually becomes unusable. Bear in mind that not all tabs behave identically. I've seen some use 2 gigs of RAM on their own, but we chose a mix of web pages that we feel should be representative of typical browsing behavior. With 4 gigs of RAM, we actually hit the page file with just 5 tabs open, and then after 13, Chrome crashed. Alrighty then, with 8 gigs, we got to a respectable 25 tabs before any of them got swapped out, and managed 40 before the situation went totally south. With 16 gigs of RAM, we reached a fairly unreasonable 80 tabs open before page filing, and then Chrome finally crashed at around 180. Then with 32 gigs of RAM, we got all the way to 165 tabs before paging, and frankly we didn't feel like going through the actually kind of laborious process of opening and loading 350 to 400 web pages in Chrome tabs just to see the program fail. I mean, if you want that many tabs, you're kind of doing it wrong, and this is coming from me. So let's move then into gaming. If all you're doing is playing a game, I think you might actually be surprised by how little RAM you actually need. Deus Ex Mankind Divided, for example, which recommends 12 gigs of RAM, didn't suffer too badly even with only a single 4 gig stick. Although with that said, Rise of the Tomb Raider had some serious issues that were only sorted out by bumping up to 8 gigs of RAM. After that though, performance didn't change for either of them when we jumped to 16 or 32 gigs. So okay then, 8 gigs for gamers? Actually, maybe not. I mean, what if you don't painstakingly close down all of your running applications every time you launch Steam? For those folks, we popped open our 10 tab test suite and an instance of Discord to see if 8 gigs could handle it. And surprisingly enough, there was no difference at all, with the exception of Rise of the Tomb Raider. That game seems to really love its RAM. So then, depending on the game, you probably won't need 16 gigs of RAM to play it, but it won't give you a ton of breathing room for the future and you might need to limit your background tasks for the best experience. So then, what does anyone need more than 8 gigs of RAM for? Well, I would argue that any kind of workstation is going to want at least 16, and you might be surprised to find out that even more is pretty common for those kinds of systems. Alex actually has a number of Excel documents from his engineering days that, believe it or not, will not even open on a computer with 8 gigs of RAM, and has had some simulations of fluid flow or suspension movement that crash out, even with 16 gigs of RAM. Video editing can also be very demanding, but this is heavily dependent on your workload. If you're cutting together short to medium length 1080p videos, 16 gigs should be plenty. But the sky is the limit here. If you use tools like After Effects, you can expect needing 16 to be an absolute minimum, and as the complexity of your project increases, so does your RAM requirements. Our latest season of Scrapyard Wars, for example, because of how darn much footage was in the timeline, immediately crashes with anything less than 64 gigs of RAM. Although, for more information about how much RAM you need for video editing specifically, you can check out our video here, where we tested it with up to 128. Now, it should be noted that all of what I'm saying concerns system memory and not video memory, which is used for loading in 3D objects and textures for your graphics cards use. This is very important for games and also professional applications, but is probably a discussion for a different video. One I can almost guarantee will end with, well, it depends. One interesting side note before we wrap up is that as we moved up from 4 gigs of RAM, our system boot times actually got slower. It was only at most a second more, but this is cool. If you're aware of a Windows feature called SuperFetch, it actually makes sense. SuperFetch tries to intelligently preload some programs into RAM, so that they'll launch faster when you need them. So the idea is that if you run out and buy excess memory, it can still be used for something. Which doesn't mean, though, that we're saying to do that. As you might have noticed, RAM prices are out of control right now. So our recommendation for general users and gamers is 8 gigs if you're looking to scrape by and be ready to upgrade later, and 16 gigs if you want to be comfortable for a while. As for the workstation users out there, well, uh, it depends. And you know what else it depends on? That doesn't depend on that at all, forget it. Corsair's new light loop fans. These things look freaking incredible. They have dual RGB lighting loops with 16 independent RGB LEDs in every fan that are split between two separate loops allowing for nearly endless customization. The included Corsair Lighting Node Pro enables dynamic lighting effects with other Corsair Link-supported devices, and they've got complete PWM control so they can be controlled anywhere from 600 RPM all the way up to 1500 RPM depending on whether you want them to be quieter or cool more efficiently. So check them out over at the link in the video description because, come on baby, it's RGB. You know you love it. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum which you should totally join.