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I'm building a developer PC and am wondering whether to get 8GB or 12GB. It's a Core-i7 860 system, i.e., 1156 motherboards with 4 slots for RAM sticks, dual channel, usually up 16GB (as opposed to 1366 sockets where 6 banks / triple-channel are used).

8GB would be cheaper to get especially because price per GB is lower with 4x2GB compared to 2x4GB. Also the availability is worse for 4GB DIMMs here where I live; those are the main practical advantages of 8GB. (Edit: I should have stressed the price difference more - in the eshop I'm buying from, the difference between 12GB and 8GB is so big that I could almost buy a whole new netbook for it.)

However, I understand that more RAM can never do harm which is the point of this question - how much of a difference will 12GB make as opposed to 8GB? Honestly, I've always been on 3.2GB systems (4GB but 32bit system) and never felt much pain from having too little memory - of course there could be more but for instance compiler's performance was usually held back by slow I/O or not utilizing multiple cores on my CPU. Still, I'm not questioning that 8GB will be useful, however, I'm not sure about the additional 4GB difference between 8 and 12 gig. Anyone has experience with 8GB / 12GB systems?

The software I usually run all the time:

  • Visual Studio or Eclipse (both should be fine with ~2GB RAM, after that I feel their performance is I/O bound)
  • Firefox (it can never have enough RAM can it? :)
  • Office (~500MB RAM should be enough)
  • ... and then some smaller apps like Skype, other browsers, some background services etc.
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I use 2gb for dev now, my new PC i'm building will have 12gb for Dev – jasondavis Feb 22 '10 at 20:14
A developement PC should have a little ram and a slow processor. That way people would start writing efficient programs again :) – Waxhead Oct 9 '11 at 23:19

3 Answers

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I run 4GBs and do programming, virtualisation and a whole load of stuff - I hardly ever go above 80% usage.

On my next pc, I will most likely go to 8GBs simply because I can - not because I need to.

Unless you are going to do virtualisation or anything specifically memory intensive, I would say that 8GB would be ample to last the next few years at least.

(Don't want to get quoted on this in the future but...) Most likely, by the time you need 12GBs, it will cost less to buy 12GBs from scratch than today's price difference between buying 8GBs and 12GBs.

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+1 especially for the "it'll be cheaper by the time you need it". – sleske Feb 22 '10 at 16:22
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+1 this has been my experience as well. 8GB feels about right now, so i'm likely to upgrade my 4GB system. When i built it mid 2008 4GB was plenty but i've since installed Windows 7, am running a new emulator, am looking at RAM disks, etc. Another 4GB is way cheaper now. – bill weaver Feb 22 '10 at 16:35
Hmmm... in general the suggestion of waiting till you need more still applies, but i just double-checked prices. The $75 2x2GB i bought almost 2 years ago is now $78. So, caveat emptor. – bill weaver Feb 22 '10 at 21:22
up vote 2 down vote

how much of a difference will 12GB make as opposed to 8GB?

Not much until you need it. As an ASP.NET/C#/SQL Server developer, it's almost too easy to just eat up RAM not to mention all the tabs in Firefox/Chrome take up a significant amount of RAM.

From a developer's perspective, get as much as you can. If it's 12GB, get it. If it's 16GB, get that. Bear in mind if you need to run VirtualBox/VMWare Fusion/etc. to test environments, the more RAM the better. Don't forget too that disk speed more than anything will probably help (SSDs in particular).

As a developer there's no real reason to turn down more resources unless the costs are extremely high. More RAM is affordable. An SSD however, requires some budgeting.

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The price difference is significant, unfortunately. – Borek Feb 22 '10 at 16:42
Well if price is the primary issue than the obvious answer is whatever you can afford. The reality is that the majority of people will consume as many resources concurrently until performance becomes an issue. If all you have is 4GB, you simply won't run as many services/apps/widgets/etc. But if you had more RAM available (8gb/12/gb/16gb/etc.), you'll gladly use it without thinking about it. – osij2is Feb 22 '10 at 17:10
up vote 1 down vote

Remember, if you are doing CPU intensive stuff like encoding High Definition video then you better have the processing power to backup 8GB of ram.

Storage centered PC's like memcache servers need more ram than CPU since the data just sits there.

Logic centered PC's need more CPU than Ram since everything is processed and then removed.

I have a standard Core2Quad system with 4GB of ram and between W/LAMP, firefox, adobe CS4, and my HD video work I never make it over 1.5GB before my CPU is at 90% usage from the programs in that RAM.

So make sure you know what the system is for because 12GB of ram isn't worth anything in the wrong system with a slow CPU.

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It's a developer's PC as noted in the description. IDEs are very resource intensive and they consume "everything" - CPU for compilation and background analysis, RAM to hold large data structures and disk access is also very important (compilation may need to read many different small files). – Borek Feb 23 '10 at 8:42

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