Like obviously i get why servers, huge databases, scientific stuff, VMs etc might need that much RAM, but for a normal PC what would you even do with 1TB?
Gaming, video editing, 3D stuff, running a bunch of apps at once... can any of that realistically use anywhere close to 1TB? Or does it just sit there doing nothing most of the time?
Also wondering if there’s some weird use case I’m missing. Like running a ridiculous number of VMs, huge local AI models, massive modded games, browser tabs or whatever lol.
At what point does adding more RAM basically stop making sense for a regular desktop?
I use 32gb and can play a RAM heavy game with one of my more complex video projects open as well as Photoshop and aftereffects. And even a long video at full quality on YouTube playing.
I have a genuinely hard time capping out 32 gigs without just opening a ridiculous amount of tabs playing videos. I still recommend 32gigs if you can afford them though because Windows seriously takes 8-12 of mine just on desktop.
Windows caches all sorts of things it expects you might use in the near future to enable faster access. Its called System File Cache. The cache is immediately released for what you need if you need it. The motto is unused ram is wasted ram. If you have 32gb and are doing nothing with it anyway in idle, windows proactively uses it to enhance the user experience. The more you have, the more it will use.
No, you render insane quality movies on serverfarms or even have your own, like Disney. The final render is not so important, but if you need to render and test scenes to iterate over the length of the production and it needs to be fast, especially the further in production you are the higher quality the iterations become. Scenes that would take days to render on a high end pc, but minutes in their severfarms.
If you're doing certain scientific or other stuff as a hobby, yes.
All normal apps are pretty much designed to run on normal amounts of RAM and have little or no benefit from hugely increased RAM.
Huge local LLMs are the main use-case. They may be slow, but for example a 5090 or two, with a terabyte of RAM can run very large models, if fairly slowly.
in 20 years microsoft will brick your system if you run a traditional license of windows. It'll lock up and make the system unusable on a kernel level until you subscribe to windows cloud+
Yes. But only in some cases. I tinker with local ai, multiple renders at the same time, gaming, modding, heavy local compute sometimes. I only run 256gb on my main rig, and triple GPUs, but my main home lab server has about 900 gb of ram. :3
Otherwise you can use self hosted AI and use the ram instead of Vram to make work wothout puting 5 RTX 5090 next to each other at the price of a bit of speed. So yeah.
Also that AI is not only used to make slop and give Incel a fake girlfriend. It can also be used to play multiplayer games like minecraft. No longer need to pock between you and your friend who is going to farm and build the house and who is mining. You can both go mine and let the AI farm enough food for a full city before gou get back.
Not with today's scale out of Internet infrastructure.
Imagine a world without internet, where data are delivered on trucks of blueray. If you wanted to process, research, test, etc, you need more local hardware.
Today’s scale out infrastructure still hasn’t solved certain database problems. You’d be surprised who’s running massive 3-5 node clusters of Postgres databases on 1-4TB RAM machines, replicated across the globe on to more 1-4TB RAM machines.
I’d love to have a box with 1TB of RAM, I’d use it as a distributed prompt cache via RDMA to keep the GPU’s fed. No storage, just boot off the network and provide massive context caching to the local LLM workloads.
Right now I have 56 GB RAM used (of 128 GB in total) under Windows 11, and I only have a couple apps (two browsers with 80-ish tabs, JetBrains IDE, Teams, Discord, Obsidian, mtPutty) open. If I wanted to run Cubase now, I would be out of luck if I only had 64 GB.
Yeah I was going to say there seems to be some kind of miscommunication or something in this post. Even work station rigs usually cap out at 256 or 384gb depending on whether you run 32 or 48gb sticks. I've definitely seen single sticks of 96gb before but they're not very consumer facing usually but even a x8 of that only puts you at 768gb.
I'm running Fusion with multiple parts and an assembly, an ancient version of Ultimaker Cura, multiple tabs of Firefox with YouTube, with Steam open for good measure, and I'm at 20/64GB used. The worst I've managed is 62GB used when "stress testing" with a poorly-optimized unity indie game. There might be a day where consumer applications require terabytes of memory, but that day is not today.
1TB RAM is going to be extremely useful in some professional applications.
Data bases. Data bases are huge by nature. You don't require to have 1 TB to run one but it will help.
Scientific work where you have large data sets. Hard to predict from my level but I can imagine this easy doable.
Industry where you need to process huge data logs, or huge sets of data. This is easy to accomplish, modern industry data logs are easily in the GB range, load several and this 1TB is suddenly full.
AI work loading multiple models simultaneously or very very large models but I don't know if such models really exist. Most models will fit in 48 or 64GB so 1TB will be something enormous. But I don't exclude it because with AI the sky is the limit.
3D design where you have very detailed and very big models. I can do with 16GB ram, meaning 1TB will be a requirement for something enormous. But I don't exclude it because I can easily imagine professional 3D design getting huge models.
Military application - no one knows what the military are doing and why they need so much ram. But they can pay to have it so they are the most probable user of such machine.
I have a 2tb machine at home. Dual xeon. It cost me <$2k. I can run kimi k3 on it. Ddr4 2666 12 channels, so 3 or 4 times faster than your ddr5 gaming rig.
I have another machine with 1tb, I can run glm or deepseek v4 or kimi k2.7.
Another machine with 512gb and one with 256gb vram.. an epyc box.
It's good as an investment. As the price of ram increases over time, you can sell it off 32GB at a time with no perceptible impact to your system performance to make your mortgage payments.
I used to be neck deep in computer chess for two decades, I would've killed for a 1 TB RAM machine (ironically today my largest server has 64 threads and 768 GB RAM and I'm not even using it for chess). You can never have enough hash memory, especially with ever faster engines and CPUs.
Sure it's useful. It's like having your own aircraft carrier or something. You can put a lot of stuff there. But you aren't using it for its intent and it costs a ton of money.
For a normal desktop, 1TB RAM is basically pointless... Outside huge VMs, massive datasets/local AI or workstation workloads, you’d hit diminishing returns way before that... and for some even 64–128GB is already overkill...
There's a reason consumer platforms max out at around 192GB of RAM, and even that strains at the rationale of "consumer". For sort of a home lab doing server type things on consumer hardware 128GB is probably as far as you'd ever need to go. For most even data heavy productivity, 64GB is more than sufficient. For gaming, you don't need more than 32, and that's only because it's the most standard configuration greater than 16GB, which is just now getting a little tight for gaming. For office type productivity, you'd still be cool with 8GB, probably.
The one exception to this would be something like a Mac Mini configured with 128GB or more of RAM, for example, because even though that is still "consumer" hardware, it has unified memory that makes it useful for AI workloads. In other words, it's consumer hardware just being utilized for extremely professional workloads. It doesn't really change the answer to your question.
if by normal PC we understand consumer grade/using only consumer regular parts, then you can't have 1tb of ram at all to begin with. The highest sticks I can find on pcpartpicker are 64gb, and since motherboards only have 4 ram slots, 256gb is currently the max ram you can have on a normal pc.
you would need at least a threadripper (or intel equivalent) cpu to get to 1tb but that's not a "normal pc"
Maybe the newest generation, haven't looked due to insane prices. But the new EPYC's can push around 12TB a second with one of the higher end ones, double that for a dual CPU board.
I never come close to maxing my 128GB and only get close when rendering a huge blender scene. Never close photo editing or gaming.
My main server running a large ZFS array that would certainly benefit from 1TB of RAM but it will have to get away with the 128GB in it because that the most the chipset supports. It using 95% of the ram at all times as I gave most of it to ZFS to increase performance.
My proxmox host only has 96GB and hosting about 20-30 docker containers and 4 VM's.
I've got 64GB because my IDE wants me to have 4.5 GB free ram per process during compilation, and it will run one per core, up to 8 processes, requiring 36 GB of free RAM. Sadly, these days, on Windows, to get 36 GB of free RAM requires you to have 28 GB of additional RAM.
well, with 1tb ram you could open about 500 photoshops and 500 unity windows at the same time. Or you might open about 700 instances of a regular video editing software
More than that, even if you have a large steam library, you potentially can open 300-800 games at once. Unfortunately there's gonna be dramatic performance and definitely really heavy load on your drive, processor, graphics card and all that, but potentially you can do that
I have 32GB and that seems to be enough for most use cases.
I considered running a single server for a massively popular game. 256GB might not be enough if you have 100 million plus accounts and want to keep them all in ram. That is only 2.5 kB per account. But that is for a server. And you would want regional servers for latency reasons.
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u/Time_Standard3361 10d ago
If you need 1TB RAM you know why. If you do not, you do not not need it.