8GB vs 16GB RAM?

[GeekOfBroadband]

Hi,

Recently I played some games for a while and it minimised the game and said something about low memory, I have 8GB 1600Mhz RAM is it worth upgrading to 16GB 1600Mhz RAM? Also can anyone tell me if this RAM: Kingston 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 Non-ECC CL9 SODIMM (Kit of.. | Ebuyer.com will fit in the Clevo 170SM/EM laptop.

Thanks

 

[Celegorm]

Assuming this is your laptop, yes it will:
CLEVO - Products

 

[berry120]

Hi,

Recently I played some games for a while and it minimised the game and said something about low memory, I have 8GB 1600Mhz RAM is it worth upgrading to 16GB 1600Mhz RAM? Also can anyone tell me if this RAM: Kingston 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 Non-ECC CL9 SODIMM (Kit of.. | Ebuyer.com will fit in the Clevo 170SM/EM laptop.

Thanks

It could be, but also make sure you haven't got anything else that's causing the problem first - lots of things running in the background, any viruses or malware, etc. 8GB is still a fair chunk and I'd be surprised if just playing one game maxes that out (though I'd recommend checking the minimum specs to make sure.)

I have 16GB in my machine, but that's mainly due to running lots of development tools and VM's concurrently which I need for the work I do - it would be unusual for one application to swallow 8GB whole (and because of the 32 bit limit would also mean that application could only ever run on a 64 bit architecture.)

 

[ssc456]

(and because of the 32 bit limit would also mean that application could only ever run on a 64 bit architecture.)

^ Not entirely true many 32 bit applications can use more than the 32 Windows OS limitation. Very bizarre I know but we have a couple of instances of 32 bit SQL Server running on a 64 bit machine that use more than 4GB RAM?

Yeah more memory will help in almost every case however I would dig deeper first as Berry said just playing 1 game and maxing out 8Gb is not normal, it should be hammering your graphics CPU and graphics memory not your regular RAM.

 

[GeekOfBroadband]

I think I actually had about 4GB of RAM left when it came up with the error and also which is weird on task manager it says I'm using 30% of my RAM but then when I add up all the RAM that's being used it doesn't even come to 1GB of RAM and 30% of 8GB isn't 1GB so I'm thinking have I limited windows to using all of it? Or is it because they are 32bit programs?

 

[berry120]

Not entirely true many 32 bit applications can use more than the 32 Windows OS limitation. Very bizarre I know but we have a couple of instances of 32 bit SQL Server running on a 64 bit machine that use more than 4GB RAM?

Nope, I mean a 32 bit application running on a 32 bit architecture can never use more than 4GB - on a 64 bit architecture it is possible with a few tweaks, sort of - but I've never seen this used outside of an enterprise environment (certainly it would be very odd with a game.)

As to other causes of the problem, double check you haven't got a large chunk of memory assigned to embedded graphics or similar - that can sometimes cause issues (but even then, not really to the extent you're describing.)