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RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Double the ram that YOU realistically need but maybe not of the RAM that they need.. perhaps they do more than just gaming?
What could they possibly do that needs that much RAM that does not provide an income.
64 GB is more than just a bit of extra memory. 32 is enough even if you are running docker containers.
Just buying RAM for the sake of it and then complaining about lack of affordability is not a helpful thing. Yes RAM was cheap so people did that. But you can just not do that and be mostly fine.
Even if it provides an income that doesn't necessarily mean they've got an employer financing it or that they're super well-off. Freelancers and contractors exist after all.
For me, an upgrade from 32 GB to 64 or more would benefit my work, but not to a degree that I want to pay current RAM prices for it. I'm not suddenly going to get 10 hours of work done in 8 just because the RAM intensive parts of my workflow take 10x less time because it's no longer all happening in swap. It'd be more like 10 hours of work done in 9.5. Adds up over time, but also a pretty small difference to even account for.
A CPU upgrade would currently be more important for me though, that might literally save me an hour or two per day depending on what I'm doing and how much shit needs to get done. 5950x starting to look mighty attractive compared to my 3500x.
Saving 2 hours a week is about the price of ram in a month or two.
64gb of ram is very useful for 3d modeling and other hobby arts.
Used to be cheap AF too. Shame
I have 64 GB in my CAD machine, unfortunately or fortunately it doesn't really make use of it like systems used to 15 years ago. Many CAD tools write portions to nvme temp drive folders now and don't fill RAM, that way the companies can claim a lower hardware spec (at least thats my theory on why they no longer max it out)
My primary gaming machine is also my primary work machine because my job gave me a budget and told me to build whatever I needed.
I genuinely find myself sometimes pushing 45-50GB of usage but then I also run local LLM workloads (sometimes glm-4.7-flash for agent use, and our apps use LLMs for things like smart paste and title/tag generation).
Fair point. But for data security etc. Most people must use different devices + that's a for profit, not for leisure operation. I was just saying that you don't need it in a personal computer you are not using for work.
You are right, people overbuild. And if they log ovwrall system load its probably so low on a home server.
I personally use like 40gb of ram opening up city skylines and rimworld before I started compressing textures. VMs, video editing, 3d modeling are all ram demons and are all hobbies people have.
There are plenty of workloads that need 64 to 128 gb of ram.
Yeah. But not in a personal rig. Professional compute + shit like that is suffering much more. Which is what I was saying.
If you dont do that stuff as a job and do it as a hobby theres no reason not to have it in your personal rig. Ram was dirt cheap and if you've got a top tier CPU you may as well go hard.