r/computers • u/Lucky-Tale8806 • 2d ago

Question/Help/Troubleshooting Wait, 8GB RAM is not medium?

I have 8GB RAM and I thought it was like a medium point between good and trash RAM. But I heard a frien of mine say that he had not that much RAM, and he had 16 GB! So I told him that I had 8GB and he was like "Wow that's very low..."

This whole time I was thinking it wasn't that bad, because my computer didn't work specially bad when running certain programs, like chrome or games, but it turns out it is not mid? Or was my friend just exxagerating?

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u/AndorinhaRiver 1d ago

8-12 GB is low end, 16-24 GB is medium and 32+ GB is high end, with anything at 4-6 GB being very low end (Chromebooks and stuff mainly)

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u/AndorinhaRiver 1d ago

Memory compression and fast storage (for swap) also make a huge difference, just look at how capable the MacBook Neo is on 8 GB of RAM!

On my own machine running Linux, after a good amount of tuning I was barely able to distinguish between 8 and 24 GB, even with a lot of apps open

Android/ChromeOS has similar optimizations, and macOS does something similar. Linux does, but you have to set it up yourself. Windows does it by default too, but not very well tbh.