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Photo editing is far more demanding than basic office or web functionality, and is usually right on the cusp of what an affordable system can do well. We decided to test photo editing with Photoshop CC, Adobe’s current offering, and used unedited photos from a smartphone, each with 5312 x 2988 resolution, and measuring 5-6 MB each.
When it comes to a PC component as opaque as system memory, the idea of value-for-money often gets put aside when considering the “best” choice for a performance machine. But there’s a big statement that should be made here: Most programs see very little gain from high-performance memory with elite specs, and even the most memory-impacted programs we’ve used have showed less than 6% performance gain in going from ordinary DDR4 to an optimized configuration. In these titles, the amount of RAM used in total ranges from 6.6GB to 11.3GB ( F1 2018 and The Division 2, respectively). Even the low-end 6.6GB is too close for comfort to pegging 8GB capacity, given the overhead for the OS. So if you are a gamer, you may be able to get away with 8GB, but we recommend going for at least 16GB.
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If you’re using one of the best video editing software programs like Premiere Pro to edit and render 4K videos, you’ll want 32GB of RAM at a minimum. The same is true for recording and editing audio and photo editing in Photoshop, especially if you have multiple files open at once. Some professionals (like 3D animators or game developers) may even want 64GB of memory, though these are admittedly specialized fields. If it's just to cut some of the unnecessary stuff around family videos to share with your Mom, then 4GB will be just about enough for this job. However, if its for the likes of 4K YouTube video creation (which means editing, transitions, audio levelling, color correction and the like), you're going to need a lot more.
If you’re a creative professional, however, your needs are different. Those who are rendering large files or doing other memory intensive work, should consider going with 32GB or more. But outside of those kinds of use cases, most of us can get by just fine with 16GB. 32GB: Overkill? So what can we do with the extra capacity that 32GB affords if you’re not making use of it regularly? Some movie and photo editing tasks (among other uses), especially in 4K+ resolutions, can benefit from a RAM disk, which takes some of the ultra-fast volatile RAM capacity and turns it into a drive. That drive can then be used as a scratch disk for projects, which is notably faster than having it on a traditional drive--even a very past PCIe SSD. In those cases, having a RAM disk can cut project times down, and make general performance (like scrubbing through an unrendered video project) more smooth and responsive. Bottom Line That leads to our general capacity guidelines. We recommend 16GB of main system memory for most users who want to multitask without incurring the above-mentioned slowdown, and 32GB for heavy multi-taskers or those running memory-hogging programs such as video editors. While creating and editing documents is generally a low-resource task, office productivity gets much more demanding as you open multiple files in multiple programs. For this test we looked at various programs in Microsoft’s Office Suite, examining how large files stress memory as well as using multiple productivity programs at once. If you want to make the most of your multitasking, these are the tests to look at. Beyond that is overkill for most folks. Programs that run optimally with 64GB or more are generally designed for experienced or professional users who already know how much they need—or at least, who know that they need all they can get.
But not everything is quite so demanding, and you can find games that will run on nearly any laptop out there. Low-end gaming doesn’t require much in the way of hardware, letting you play games likeCuphead, Minecraft or Overwatch without investing in a purpose-built machine. The memory controllers of most consumer processors support up to four ranks of memory per channel, which is why so many dual-channel boards have four slots and why so many quad-channel boards have eight. If every module used in these boards was dual-rank, the memory controller would be “full.” Today, 16GB is the sweet spot between price and capacity for most enthusiasts and gamers. That amount gives you the headroom to do a couple of things at once, without having to close tabs or applications to exceed your available RAM. Moreover, most of that gain can simply be achieved by moving from one rank per channel to two, something that you might accomplish by simply adding another two matched-spec modules to a machine that has two empty slots. So bear that in mind as you shop the sales.
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