How much ram do I need?

[Anonymous]

A bit off topic for this app but it’s the only social I have.

Currently have 16gb, I’m a software and creative engineer, what I have isn’t cutting it. I’m willing to spend whatever needed on ram. My CPU is doing fine. Could use better graphics card as well if have any recommendations.

I want to be able to have all this open at a time, I don’t like closing and having to reopen:
5 desktops
- Fusion 360 or autocad
- 50ish tabs various across 5 open chrome instances
- Word or excel
- visual studio (2 projects open at a time)
- visual studio code (2 projects open at a time)
- Git
- Android studio - one emulator
- Postgres sever manager
- MSSQL server manager
- One local server running but can go up to 2
- Microsoft teams, zoom
- Adobe illustrator and photoshop
- bit defender antivirus
- Indesign, premier on occasion
- Blender on occassion
- Filezilla
- scraper running in background
- spotify

Updates

+1 y

The options: 32gb, 64gb, 128gb

[Middleman]

Between 32GB & 64GB it should be more than sufficient for you for your apps. However I would definitely recommend also upgrading the CPU and motherboard to say something like an Alder Lake i9-12900K for better speeds. For GPU I recommend AMD RX6900 16GB and enabling the Resizeable Bar option in BIOS, as it will allow more of the GPUs memory to be accessed directly by the system.

[bingbongbangbung]

Nah man, this guy should get an overclocked RX 7900 XTX or a typical RTX 4090.

[jshm2]

16GB is fine, 32GB is better. But it's probably your graphics card and storage SSD speeds that are going to cause you the bottleneck.

[bingbongbangbung]

Yeah you're gonna have to go with 64GB RAM, especially since you're multi-tasking and having so many productivity apps open. Even 32GB RAM you're probably gonna run into some problems with all those browser tabs being opened alongside productivity apps.

I don't know what your current CPU and GPU are, but in 2023 (soon to be 2024), you'll need at least Core i5 12400F or Ryzen 5 5600G and RTX 3050 or RX 6600 8GB. But if you can afford it, go for Core i9 14900KF or Ryzen 9 7950X3D and RTX 4090 or RX 7900 XTX (get an OC variant from a more premium OEM).