Is 8GB+ RAM overkill?

long_b

Picked up a cheap HP 8570w for the young lad as an entry level gaming laptop.

It came with 16GB RAM. Is this overkill - would 8GB be sufficient for gaming?

Mostly Minecraft and Arc

MADFI5H

no not overkill, just right for those 2 games as both are tough on ram i think,
you could easily get by with 8 but since u have 16 u may as well keep it

TerrorFirmer

it's not Necessarily overkill in general and if it came with the laptop, grand. I think you'd have a very tough time playing ark on that though, the GPU is very low end assuming its the k1000.

The_Valeyard

Not overkill in today's gaming world.

long_b

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

it's not Necessarily overkill in general and if it came with the laptop, grand. I think you'd have a very tough time playing ark on that though, the GPU is very low end assuming its the k1000.

K2000 if that helps?

Samuel T. Cogley

16GB and lots (well 4 ish) of cores because we can't keep our grubby paws off the OS install :pac: How many background tasks are running on it? I've at least half a dozen for RGB, overclocking etc. and those are just the ones I know about.

TerrorFirmer

long_b wrote: »

K2000 if that helps?

Better but still based on the GT640/650M, which are pretty old mobile cards. I don't think you'll get much out of Ark except low settings at low fps.

The laptop has generally decent specs and a good processor, but it's just not really a gaming laptop - you can get 2nd hand gaming laptops for about €400 that would be 2 or 3 times faster and better balanced.

It doesn't help as well that ARK is a total resource hog.

K.O.Kiki

RAM matters little for most tasks tbh.

CalamariFritti

Within normal parameters you can't really have to much RAM. RAM is good. Its like asking is there too much air to breathe. You might not use it all but too much? No

long_b

Thanks for the replies

Meant to say, I have other uses for the RAM if not needed in this machine for gaming

ozmo

Chrome uses a lot of ram - if you like to have several windows open 8 Gigs is often not enough.

Minecraft will run ok on 4Gs ram - I think you actually have to go in and manually change some advanced settings to force it to use more than this.

No disadvantage of having 16Gigs ram though except Windows Hibernate function if you use that will take as much harddisk space. Personally I really like the hibernate function and take the hit on my ssd space for it.