How much memory do I need for my laptop?

Question

Could any of you clarify the amount of memory that a laptop should ideally have depending on the different use cases?

Answer 1

Laptop memory requirements are determined by user purpose. For light use such as browsing or Ms Office usage, 8GB is quite enough. For users working with more demanding applications or requiring more performance for tasks like programming, video/photo editing, or gaming, 16GB is considered to be optimal. For more than average users, pursuing serious physical work or working with heavy applications, 32GB is used as a guiding number. Only go over 32GB and above if one is definite that it is required for very demanding video applications such as editing or 3D animations. It's worth mentioning that memory resources utilization needs to be followed to make a sound choice.

Comments

One thing Josh didn't mention is that some iGPUs can steal away system RAM for use by the iGPU. This is usually dynamic and may rarely be taken away when needed for something other than the GPU. However it's usually a BIOs setting And can just be a static amount that is always reserved for the iGPU whether needed or not

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For a basic, general purpose office PC, 8gb of DUAL CHANNEL RAM is usually adequate, but anything beyond that use case needs at the very least 16gb of dual channel RAM and in most cases some sort of separate GPU.  32gb and up is not really overkill anymore. Especially with an oinker of an OS like Windows 10 or 11.

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I got my laptop at a great deal with 16GB of RAM. I generally just use 'office' or 'light' usage tasks, but hate closing windows and tabs unless I'm completely finished with the task. I run Linux, and have turned Swappiness entirely off, and unless I launch Minecraft, I almost never go over 8GB of RAM. I'm glad I got 16GB of RAM, but if it wasn't for the occassional Minecraft session, I wouldn't need more than 8GB at all. People go way overkill with RAM imo.

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I find that if you need to use Excel and use multiple vLookups and cross reference different sheets, etc., then 16GB may not be enough at times if you are dealing with large data sets.

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18 months ago I built my AMD R9-5950X system with 128GB DDR4 and an RTX-3080.  I thought 128GB would be enough.  This summer I built an Intel Xeon W7 workstation with 512GB of DDR5 memory and an RTX-3090.  Now I'm closer to what I need.  I do Unreal Engine 5 video game design and I also work with large terrains with the software I develop called TerreSculptor.

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I built a Threadripper 3960X system with 24 cores, 48 threads, a little over a year ago. MOBO (ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha) has 8 RAM slots on the mobo, each can take up to a 32 GB DIMM. But unfortunately, the AIO cooler I bought for it kind of blocks two of the 8 slots (nearest slot on each side of the cpu). So I have 6 slots * 32 GB = 192 GB of RAM. And quite frankly, I love it. Most modern OSes will utilize all of that RAM as disk cache unless and until it needs to release some for application usage. So basically, after bootup, your drives will only need to read a hard drive block once until next reboot, unless RAM gets low, or you are doing something on the machine that necessitates reading MORE than 192 GB of drive data between reboots. Subsequent reads of that same block will come straight from RAM, rather than asking the HD for it. If/when memory fills with disk cache, most OSes will keep track of which blocks of data are more in demand, and will flush the drive data of blocks that are less frequently requested. Long story short, your drives will last much MUCH longer with lots of free RAM. But as soon as you reboot the machine, it has to start back over caching everything again. So it's best to avoid unnecessary reboots.