Whats really the point of 16GB or RAM?

So Ive been shopping for a new laptop for college they recommend 16GB of RAM but every where I check the differences seem so minor between 8GB and 16GB.

Is there even a point to getting the 16?
Im an engineering major btw if that gives any context

It's $current_year and bad code is literally everywhere and use more memory than you would think. Your school is probably just encouraging students to be on the safe side.

>Im an engineering major btw if that gives any context
If you do any sort of FEA or other simulation, 8GB can be extremely limiting.

Though you can get by with that much if you're clever and willing to accept the limits.

Its good for leaving a whole bunch of shit open on your laptop for along time. For example, sometimes I have 3-5 instances of intellij running, with 1-2 instances of Eclipse, and 20-30 browser tabs, some .xls spreadsheet, and Outlook. All while having an uptime of about a week or two.

If you ever write code that manipulates large data sets then yes it is a life saver. If you plan on writing some "sweet HTML code mannn" then you are good with 4-8 depending on your IDE choices etc.

RAM is generally pretty cheap. Buy a laptop without soldered RAM and upgrade it.

Even if you don't use if most of the time, when you need to run multiple VMs for a networking class or crunch large datasets you'll be glad you did. And you get a general small speedup from increased disk caching benefits when you aren't actively using the RAM.

24GB is the bear minimum you'd want in 2017.

Find a two for 1 on 8GB

Also Chromium uses a good 12GB if you have 50 tabs open like me.

Less than 24GB means you're a ramlet in 2017.

Keep in mind Windows 10 (which ships with everything now) needs at least 2gb just to run on its own. With anything but a completely barebones OS running, you will probably idle around 3-4gb. With only 8gb of RAM, you're limiting your overhead to less than 4gb.

>bear minimum
bare minimum

you illiterate moron

This. I'm an EE major and sometimes I'll end up with PyCharm, Mathematica, Vivado, Word, Excel, LTSpice, and 30+ browser tabs across 9 virtual desktops. 16GB is comfy and in 2017 you're not really paying a premium for it. And god forbid you need to do some stuff with VMs.

i run a 50+ tabs on firefox for facebook stalking and a bunch of chrome tabs for another facebook stalking and it took 10gb rams.

64gb rams for 2017 if you're not a fag.

>Is there even a point to getting the 16?
Well, if you want to run a modern web browser...

>4-8 GB for writing HTML
The fact that I don't even dispute that disgusts me.

Ramdisk all the things, I'll piss on your SSD's performance. Then I'll go edit some videos.

>1.18 GB for a fucking music player
It's almost impressive how bloated iTunes is.

Its a DRM enforcement platform with a music player feature added on.

Fucking miles man

I just leave browsers open for my favorite Twitch streamers.

>t.mactoddler

Yeah I took a security class where i had to run sometimes up to 3 VM with my old 4Gb laptop. It was the most painfull experience i ever had.

>DRM enforcement
>music hasn't had DRM since 2009

The only thing I use that uses a ton of RAM is a web browser.

Chrome especially has gone toward using a lot more memory to gain reductions in CPU usage.

Which.. sort of makes sense. RAM uses less electricity than the CPU does.

But it's still weird. I thought 16GB was plenty 5 years ago. Now I'm suddenly upgrading to 32GB.
Almost seems crazy 32bit Windows limited you to about 3.5GB in the past, but when you think about it it does make sense. The only problem is that DDR4 memory production is much too low.

if youre really an engineering major you should know the answer

He might be a freshmen with no idea the ram hungry bullshit he is about to get himself into.

Because you can never have too much memory or storage.

Ive had 16gb since 2012, no reason why you should get anything less at this point.

>removing entire codebase from your client

>Almost seems crazy 32bit Windows limited you to about 3.5GB in the past, but when you think about it it does make sense.
This is a limitation of any 32bit OS, not just Windows. And it's not 3.5GB, it's 4GB in total including your VRAM, possibly RAID controller RAM, and system RAM.

16gbs is the new 8gbs

Because it's cheap and if you actually do things with your computer other than Facebook in this day and age you'll quickly eat up 8GB in no time.

Pic related, just browsing shitposts and I'm using nearly 5GB out of 16.

More tabs brah

>running winblows unironically
Well there's your problem

>Me
>anno domini MMXVII
>using a 8 years old laptop with 1GB of ram.

I also chew steel and drink whiskey for breakfast.

Media production

Video rendering will leave no memory unused, big Creative Cloud docs will hog memory etc

Patricians don't get moar ram. Patricians get good ram. They know how much they need, they get only that, and use the save money to get better/faster ram.

>Because it's cheap

NO ITS NOT

do people still use iTunes oh my god ahahahahahahahah

not sure if memeing but i actually happily use my win10 tablet and it only has 1gb ram. its not laggy at all.

jesus what country you in. 16gb is about 115 dolaroos in America. 240 bucks would get me 32 gb.

>24 gigs

Enjoy single channel faggot

I just got 2x16GB, 32GB total, for $135.

Well, I was obviously jokin, but yes, my laptop is like that.
It's a real pain in the ass everytime I open the browser. but I'll stick to it until the last day.

16 GB is great on desktops. I'm not sure it's worth it on a laptop unless it's a really high end one. There's just less you can get done on one that requires that much RAM.

Web browser with a bunch of tabs while doing other shit.

Virtual machines.

Id get 16 if the price was not insane but with laptops they do weird shit with solderer in memory to fuck you and purpose make the price insane.

I would point out that the web browser eating memory is not really their fault. Some of them are better then others but no matter what the web is getting bloated with video and pictures and stuff.

Virtual machines is also my primary reason, especially when running multiple virtual devices side by side to compare behavior of a common code base.

Would I notice a difference if I switched from 8 to 16 on my desktop? I pretty much only use it to browse, watch anime, and sometimes play Skyrim.

>using 5 billion bytes of information just to shitposts
Something is not right here

Not unless you use high-res texture mods.

that's vram, not ram

One word:
CACHING

Not any difference when not gaming then?

You will have to run multiple VMs and have shit-tons of RAM heavy programs open to run out of RAM at 16 GB.

I'm having 8GB at the moment though.

Unrelated but what is better : 4gb ram (800mhz) or 6gb ram (333mhz)

both are shit