Shortly ago they did a survey over in the VI-Control forum which I frequent.

VI-Control Forum

I was a bit surprized by the findings. The lowest report RAM was 16GB on a laptop other wise no reported values less than 32Gb. With many folks in the 64, 128 and 256 Ram reported.

I have run 16GB on my DAW. I just ordered 16 GB more for a total of 32 GB. The new 16GB of RAM cost 60USD. A modest price to pay.

How about you. What are you packing in your music machine.

Dual-processor 192GB.

Paj
8^)

Holy Kamole, didn't expect that

16GB.

When I am forced to get a new computer (Win 10 no longer supported) it will be 64GB.

Only 128 GB RAM here.....

16 GB. I must be good at balancing.

32 in one. 64 in the other. Speaking only of my music making computers.

"Is that a big load of RAM or are you just happy to see me?"

16 gb - 8 used to work fine on the pld pc. bigest difference on the new pc seems to be an ssd rather than an old spinner

I have 128 gb plugged in by I do a lot of video rendering on my PC. I would use a lot less for just the DAW.

Desktop - 32 Gb ram - 1 ssd, 2 HD's
Laptop - 32 Gb ram - 1 ssd, 1 HD

Jeff

Good to see you back, Keith. Hope you are mending well if not already fully mended!

Čim prej okrevaj!

I...feel....so...inadequate....

I'm running a MB that will support 4 cores and a butt load of RAM.... however.....

I'm on a 32 bit XP Pro OS and therefore only have..... (gulp) .... 4 gig in the machine.....because that's all the OS can access.

But on a happy note.... I have never had any issues loading any of the projects, recording, and processing into real time the synths and FX that I have in the machine.



I know that one of these days I will have to venture into the 64 bit world and when I do.... I will do it right. But for now..... yeah.... I'm making music with 4GB of RAM....and it's cogitating smoothly.

Too funny---LOL

Paj
8^)

16 in one, 32 in the other, but I'm not doing video processing either. Just music.

Task Manager has a Performance tab that will easily show you whether your RAM is getting taxed or not, and it comes built in with Windows. Right-click in the task bar and take a look.
If your RAM is at 90% or more, may want to think about it .. if your hard drive starts stressing when the RAM gets tight you definitely want to think about increasing RAM (the swap file is working hard to keep RAM supplied, meaning RAM is now offloading and reloading data from the drive which slows everything down).

A quick way to check where any bottlenecks are happening is the free Task Manager in Windows.
It will also show which processes are eating up the RAM or processor very quickly, so a good tool to know about.

I did not know that. Thanks. With my 16GB, my memory shows 41% with essential nothing running other than Chrome to type this message. I can't wait to see the value when I load up Reaper with a selection of NI orchestral libraies.

32 but as we’ve been creating more complex music videos of late I’m going to upgrade to 64. Cheap and takes about 10 minutes on my Mac.

Bud

I think if you are just doing music (no video, 3d stuff, or games) you can get away with 16gb, but I would recommend 32.

#1-16gb
#2-32gb

16GB ... haven't felt the need for more.

30-40% is normal. Like I said, if you start pushing 90% or so you may want to deal with it.
Glad I learned someone something today. That's always a good feeling.
I am at 32% normally (just browsing) and it will jump a little with the DAW running .. I doubt a test comparing RAM while just browsing would reveal much; test it with the DAW running and adding some stress before/after, then you'll know if there was value *for you.

If you want to get more in depth with the system, checkout Resource Manager .. it is also free from MS but may require you downloading it so it shows up, depending on your version of Windows
The second image is of current CPU effort running 8 track RB file with a few VST/VSTis .. not much difference, system is not stressed with 16 GB Ram, so far - only at about 30% RAM and nothing else stressing

16gb on a 10 year old MacBook Pro.
Upgrade time is coming.

Thanks, Eddie. I’ve recovered from the Osteomyelitis but I now have some yet undiagnosed malady that has wiped out most of my bone marrow. No chance of a bone marrow transplant at my age, so the clock is ticking just a little louder.

Sad to know that Keith. You're a good guy. Fight the good fight for Eastern European Slavic people everywhere!!

Sorry to heat that Keith.

You are in my prayers.

I only have 10g. My computer is old now.

@Keith, I'm sorry to hear that my friend. I will be praying for you.

Josie

Just installed the additional 16G for a total of32 GB. I opened my largest file (50+ trackes with almost as many orchestral libraies). Immediately check to see the Performance status in Task Manager. So far so good.

Dan, I must have missed the comparison. I think you had 41% under normal conditions, no music apps. Now you have 59% with a large project loaded. But what was that % before you upgraded?

It's in the screenshot sir. He has before and after together. He was maxing out ram before and now just using over what he had before upgrade. So it's good to see he was not needing that much of a boost. Glad the upgrade worked Dan.

Oh, now I see it. 96% down to 58%. More than 16 GB in use. Quite a difference. Since I have 16 GB RAM, I'll think about this.

Sorry for the confusion with the pictures. Here is the narrative.

Before I dropped in the new RAM I loaded the biggest Reaper Project I have. With this loaded the task manager said was using 15.3 GB equivalent to 96% of my 16GB of total available RAM.

Then I shut down and installed another 16G. Opened the same project and it said I was now consuming 18.4GB resulting in only 58% of my 32GB of RAM.

What I have not yet done is determined if this project will run better (faster) with the new RAM. So I can’t yet speak to improved performance, but I will keep an eye on it and let you know in a week or so.

You weren’t confusing. You ran a perfect test. I just didn’t see it reading on my phone.

If your project plus OS is happiest running 18+ GB of RAM, then it was doing some swapping out to your disk or SSD storage before, slowing your computer. Disk #2 must be the scratch drive for your DAW but it isn’t shown in the ‘after’ screenshot. I would expect it to be considerably lower.

I had to repeat the test to confirm what was now going on with the Disk #2 with 32 GB. I confirmed while it was reported at 15% when I had 16GB, it is now at 0% when I ran with 32GB. And by the way Disk #2 is my C:\ boot drive. It is not an SSD. But apparently Reaper uses it as a Ram Drive when needed. Interesting. Oh and by the way... things are faster!!

Very good. Probably a good idea not to use the boot drive as a RAM drive or swap file. Disk #2 says SSD, a good idea for a boot drive.

12 GB Ram on an over 12 year old computer which at the moment is running good.

Isn't it possible to have over-kill with Ram as well, and it seems to eat into hard drive space too, as I found when I upgraded form 4Gb?

No, not on a 64-bit OS. Just the opposite.

It depends on your virtual memory settings. If you let the Win OS automatically choose to set the paging file size, it MAY increase the size on a RAM upgrade. This is how Windows is by default. You can set it yourself, however. My screenshot shows that I use a fixed size (Initial/Max are the same). With a fixed size setting, it wouldn't matter what RAM changes you make.

Never been down that rabbit hole. When I got there I considered making a change. Mine is set to "auto manage". But then thought best to not monkey with things that are not broken. But that is just me.

Yes, this is an area you can safely let Windows manage. Too little RAM, too large a Paging File, and running a hard disk can all be combined in ways that will hurt performance if you don't know what you are doing.

Thanks for the detailed tip Steve, very helpful, mine is currently set at 1856 which is probably normal enough Id imagine.

I have 16GBs as well. I find it's sufficient for what I need it for!

I have the following at my disposal:

Music/video machine - i9-9900k with 64gb ram
Gaming machine - i5-11400 with 32gb ram
Macbook Pro - i5-3210m with 16gb ram
Work machine - i5-3550 with 16gb ram
Work laptop - i5-1135G7 with 8gb ram
Mac Mini - i5-4278u with 8gb ram

As technology advances, the overall need for ram will likely decrease. From my experience so far with an M1 Macbook with 8gb of ram, I was able to edit an entire video in Davinci Resolve with fewer performance issues than with my 9900k and 64gb ram - part of that as I understand it is because of the efficiency and better memory management of ARM vs x86, and part is due to increased storage speed (the SSD in my 9900k is 1900/1700mb per sec read/write vs the Macbook at 2600/2200, minimal difference in this case).

Yep. This conversation is deeply relative to your own usage. The only time I have issues is when I am rendering a video in Vegas Pro or running FOSCAM's live video monitoring. That almost takes 100% of the CPU by itself.

The need for speed has always baffled me. If something takes 30 seconds longer to execute I am hard pressed to express how little I care about it. Outside of a few heavy hitters here I just don't get the complaints about how long a song takes to render and all the other stuff I hear. Nobody here has a label breathing down their neck for tracks.

I liken this to the Jeep Renegade forum where one of the users was complaining because when his cruise control is set to 75 he is only seeing 74 on the speedometer. I mean, "OH NO!! SELL THE CAR!!!" That and one complained because when she used the bluetooth for phone calls people could hear her calls through the speakers. Well, turn the bluetooth off. That's not the car's fault.

A lot of people actively look for reasons to complain and be unhappy. On another forum (non music) somebody was griping, saying that if she closes a program and then later opens it again it loads much faster, and why it doesn't load that fast the first time. I replied "Look up the terms CACHE and TERMINATE STAY READY." and left it at that. She never posted again. LOL!!

Yes, I find that for myself it's more than enough. When I go my PC 16GB was seen as being excessive at the time — even for being a gaming computer. I've done some upgrades since then, but I don't find myself wanting in particular for additional RAM, but I understand where those might want the extra wiggle room.

Many times a performance issue can be remedied with a better graphics card. I have an Nvidia Gforce with 2GB of RAM and it's too slow. Right now just viewing a TV stream and being on the web I am using 67% of the GPU. If I open another window I will be sharing that with yet another task and all 3 will run with jitters.

My problem is that I need 4 HDMI outputs and a card to fit into a PCIe slot that won't cost me more than my car did.

Simon, you are a good "hardware nerd" source! I really need a better graphics card but it's tough finding anything that meets what I laid out above. I run 3 monitors so I need HDMI ports for them. And at least 16GB of RAM. And fit into that PCIe slot. That combination is hard to find.

Another consideration Eddie is case space. Often those nicer cards are large too. 2 to 3 slots wide and a foot long. You'll have to give up some performance if you need it to be a smaller card. I do run 4 screens off my EVGA card and it's 24 Gig. EVGA Card

This is what I have now, and this is the slot I need to use.

So is the ASUS card screenshot the replacement for the NVIDIA GFORCE on your previous post? Looks like it would be a good fit.

Good luck!










Ok ok, I'll try! What exact model of video card do you have right now? And from the pic you shared is the important part that it's a low-profile card or that the PCIe slot is a short single-lane slot?

The fastest low-profile video card I can find is an Nvidia GT 1030 with 2gb vram, and none of those have more than two outputs. One thing to keep in mind is that a 2gb card is fine for most desktop use, and what you're seeing as "67% of the GPU" is likely the actual graphics processor, not the graphics memory. With any video card, if you run out of video memory the computer will start to use system memory, which is still pretty fast.

With a single-lane slot, that's severely restricting the bandwidth to and from the card. The interesting thing about those types of PCIe slots is that you can technically put a full-size card in them, if you cut away the plastic part of the slot that stops the card from fitting (and there aren't other components next to the slot that would interfere) - this actually works, though it forces the video card to use only one PCIe lane (or however many the slot has), so it's typically not a high-performance solution. In this case, I'd replace the motherboard with one that can take a full x16 card.

Choosing a motherboard became a more time consuming process for me at the point that I realized that using all of your available expansion slots can quite often change the number of lanes available to your video card. I spend much more time now analyzing what various configurations of cards are going to do to my number of available lanes before I make a MB choice.

The multiple HDMI requirement is what's giving me problems. I may have to use this is a reason to buy a better daily driver computer. When I got that computer, and judging by the files in the system folder that was 12-7-2019, I didn't have all these monitors. With one monitor the onboard video was fine.

I only see issues when I run the program to run my outdoor video camera monitor program but that slows my display down to the 60s when people were doing The Robot. Like if I am also watching TV both screens start doing that dance. And if I have anything open on the 3rd screen they all freeze. I should add that for JUST the music apps everything is fine.

Here's what the system info says about it. So I guess I have 2GB of RAM.



As to slots available, this PC has no cards in it. USB audio interface and everything else is on a 7 port USB dock, but nothing but the video is inside the case.

No. That was just to show you the slot I have to use for video.

Thanks. Another consideration is that you can get adapters for ports too. For example you may see a card with a mix of HDMI/Display Port/DVI/VGA ports, you can usually get the correct adapter to make them all HDMI. Good luck on your continued search.

The machine I'm currently typing on is just 8Gig. It's a W7 machine and doesn't need the huge amounts just to burble along.
My recording machine - W10 - uses 16 with no memory issues.
Most of my recording involves live tracks by me & others with lots of takes on my part plus the battery of RealTracks I use to set up the demo run of each song. Up to 42 tracks with not issues - mind you I don't use any hungry VSTs.