Maximum memory for normal use

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TeleFragger

Active Member
Oct 26, 2016
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so my daily use rig is as follows:
Dell Precision T5810
Xeon e5-1630 v4
64gb DDR4 2400T (2x16gb and 4x8gb)
Dell PCIe quad nvme card with 2x Samsung 512gb nvme (PM961 and SM951)

I use this machine to do light gaming
Division, Siege, L4D2, Killing Floor, Black Ops

photo editing with Lighroom

want to get to video editing eventually....

I was just given a machine from a friend as we were talking and I told him I want to beef up my esxi box. Instead he gives me a dual xeon e5 with 256gb ram...

I thought... well I could put 128gb ram in my machine... cuz I can!!! LOL... then was like.. meh whats the norm for today?

so should I just keep the ram in the esxi box as I already have an esxi box with dual e5 xeons and 128gb ram, this esxi box and will be setting up a freenas box for iscsi for vms for the esxi boxes..

so thoughts? I don't want to just put the ram in and be like.. well I have it.. but never use it..

like having a 800hp z06 and sitting in traffic!!!!
 

TeleFragger

Active Member
Oct 26, 2016
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HAHA. My main rig has 16x 16GB sticks in it - 256GB total... why, just because I have it LOL :)
trust me.. typically that is me..
but im trying to figure out my next lab setup..
2x esxi
1x freenas - iscsi
vmotion testing, etc...

but yeah I could put that ram in anyway.. 128gb...
 
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Terry Wallace

PsyOps SysOp
Aug 13, 2018
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most people, excepting maybe 4K video editing, cant push a desktop machine past about 32gig. If you running some vm's locally a local SQL server with a ton of data etc.. your needs may go up. above 64 your really just wasting space unless your going to start down the "using ram as a ram disk for temp files etc"

freenas however loves ram for io caching. Especially if you using ZFS pools. You extra ram would probably better serve you there.

Your are the master of your Destiny.. (Monitor your ram usage for a week.. ever really pushing that 64 you have ?)
 

TeleFragger

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Oct 26, 2016
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most people, excepting maybe 4K video editing, cant push a desktop machine past about 32gig. If you running some vm's locally a local SQL server with a ton of data etc.. your needs may go up. above 64 your really just wasting space unless your going to start down the "using ram as a ram disk for temp files etc"

freenas however loves ram for io caching. Especially if you using ZFS pools. You extra ram would probably better serve you there.

Your are the master of your Destiny.. (Monitor your ram usage for a week.. ever really pushing that 64 you have ?)
yeah my freenas is an hp z420 with 8x8gb (64gb) ddr3...
this memory is ddr4 thus wont work in it....

ill just leave all that memory in the esxi host...

but yeah ill monitor my memory for a week...tonight is gaming.. hah.. I know that wont use much memory but actually the amount of "liquid" I will consume will deteriorate memory!!!!
 
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msg7086

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May 2, 2017
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The pfsense router that we had was sitting on 384GB of memory. Of course that was a waste.

As a side note, memory is always used for caching and buffering disk I/O. There's no memory space that you'll "never use".
 
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TeleFragger

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Oct 26, 2016
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The pfsense router that we had was sitting on 384GB of memory. Of course that was a waste.

As a side note, memory is always used for caching and buffering disk I/O. There's no memory space that you'll "never use".
even for nvme disks? ive only got 500gb x2 and they are both almost full so I'm gonna upgrade to 1tb soon..
I saw that wd came out with wd 1tb blue nvme.. while we all know "blue" = slow... ITS NVME!!!! still way faster than ssd!!!
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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I would keep 64GB and get an Optane to improve desktop\workstation performance.

Keep the RAM for ESXI or FreeNAS :D
 

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
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Lightroom can eat up RAM. I've gotten it to ~35GB when stitching large panoramas. I found 64GB to be adequate myself.
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Some of the guys are work I have seen to be comfortable using 256gb but they are dealing with for example design software and CFD software sometimes at the same time. (Fluid dynamics not trading software)

Me, think the 16gb on my MacBook Pro has always been more than enough for what I do.
 
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EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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Depends of course on "normal" :) Most regular PC users - browser, maybe mail, spreadsheet - would might use more than 8GB these days but certainly 16GB should be ample.

I consider myself a power user but even I don't have silly RAM requirements, probably the heaviest hitters I have in that regard are a couple of games that'll blow past 8GB, my photo software that'll happily eat 4GB, and I can just about get my browser to hit 6GB if I leave it open for a few weeks and rack up a couple of hundred tabs. Primary consumer of CPU is ffmpeg and that rarely uses more than a few hundred MB. All of this happily fits within 32GB though, I've only exceeded 24GB a couple of times.

Add in non-normal activities like virtualisation or specialised software and the sky's the limit RAM-wise.

The pfsense router that we had was sitting on 384GB of memory. Of course that was a waste.

As a side note, memory is always used for caching and buffering disk I/O. There's no memory space that you'll "never use".
I'd counter this by saying that 384GB for pfsense would almost certainly be wasted since I think it's unlikely there could be >300GB of stuff to cache; if you were running a caching proxy or something that benefited from keeping a lot of stuff in RAM then maybe it'd become useful, but I think for most things I'm aware of pfsense being used for, 384GB of RAM is absolutely a waste. Similarly I've seen plenty of servers that were so overspecced the amount of RAM exceeded the space used by the entire application load and dataset (256GB for a ~50GB dataset? Really?!) that were similarly almost entirely wasted.
 

TeleFragger

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Oct 26, 2016
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funny that I remember replacing 4mb ram with 16mb ram and Pentium pro 128k cache with 512k cache and was thinkin... life doesn't get better than this!!!!!!
 

msg7086

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May 2, 2017
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I'd counter this by saying that 384GB for pfsense would almost certainly be wasted since I think it's unlikely there could be >300GB of stuff to cache; if you were running a caching proxy or something that benefited from keeping a lot of stuff in RAM then maybe it'd become useful, but I think for most things I'm aware of pfsense being used for, 384GB of RAM is absolutely a waste. Similarly I've seen plenty of servers that were so overspecced the amount of RAM exceeded the space used by the entire application load and dataset (256GB for a ~50GB dataset? Really?!) that were similarly almost entirely wasted.
The side note was for OP, not for explaining though.