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32GB RAM -- beneficial or just money sinker?

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blueskull:
For the members who run VMs, is there a necessity to go with 32GB RAM rather than 16GB?

I'm talking about casual stuff, not heavy video editing or large FEA simulation.

Windows will be the host, running Altium, Edge (Chrome-based), VS2019 and maybe some FPGA tools, while VM will run Linux, mostly running test code or at most doing some compiling, nothing more than 8GB RAM consumption (which is the worst case, Yocto compiling, requires 12GB RAM or 8GB RAM+swap, tested with iMX6ULL BSP).

For such applications, should I consider 32GB upgrade or stick with 16GB if the price difference is $300 (soldered, not user upgradable)? I plan to keep this computer for at least 2 years, and I expect to score a good price when selling it, so it must still be usable (not essentially blazing fast) in 2022.

Thanks for any advices.

james_s:
How many VMs? I mean I use VM's on my 8GB laptop, I used them on my 1GB PC years ago, normally I'm only running one or two machines at a time though. I have 16GB in my desktop and work laptop and that has been totally adequate for what I'm doing. Then again, $300 is not really a huge amount of money and if you can't upgrade it later it might make sense to just max it out now.

james_s:
Sounds like today you'd be perfectly fine with 16GB. Whether that will be true in a year or 4 is anyone's guess.

I was about to upgrade my laptop from 8 to 16GB but I went to a SSD instead and that made such a big speed improvement that I don't really care anymore. Virtual memory is painless now, and supposedly SSD endurance for better ones is high enough that no normal person will wear one out.

hamster_nz:
16GB fine, 8GB too little, 32GB overkill.

WSL is actually quite usable for a lot of things, so install it as well, if only for  experience. Be waned that AV tends to make WSL slower than native WIndows.

Oh, and don't go for small SSD + huge HDD. The price of midsized SSDs is pretty sharp now.

I would do for 500GB NVMe or M.2 SSD, and archive off old data and backups to an external USB HDD. When an NVMe can do 500+ MB/s at sub-millisecond latencies it makes an "extra RAM for disk caching" argument very weak.

I really like my new-to-me Intel NUC with an older i5, 16GB RAM and 500GB NVMe, even if on-CPU 3D is pretty average. So much smaller!

maginnovision:
Sort of depends what kind of RAM you want/need for the VM. I don't think 32GB is needed if you stick to 4GB. If you go to 8GB and disable the windows swap file(like you should) then you can start seeing a reason to break 16GB. Regardless of an SSD making a swap file less annoying it still takes up time that it shouldn't but for my customers PC's I don't disable swap without 16GB. They do a lot of media processing so it does eat up a bit.

In the end I personally would go for the 32GB even though 300 is a little higher than I'd want to pay. You'll be running enough software on both the PC and VM that it may be necessary for peak performance. It also allows you to throw 16GB to the VM if you need it in the future. For my PC I have 32GB and a couple of TB NVMe drives running windows and ubuntu VM's(VirtualBox). Both windows and the VM run well with an average of 54% memory used. That's without running any memory intensive stuff.

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