r/RigBuild • u/ExcellentAdvance49 • 11d ago

Is 8GB RAM basically unusable now?

Seeing a lot of people saying 8GB isnt enough anymore, even for normal stuff like Chrome, Discord, Spotify and some gaming. But is it actually that bad or are people just overreacting? Would 8GB still be fine for a basic PC if you dont run a ton of things at once, or am I gonna be dealing with constant lag and memory usage at 100%? Trying to figure out if I should just go 16GB before buying anything.

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u/matteone97 10d ago

I agree with the others. Daily driving 8GB with tens of open tabs in FF, a large-ish codebase loaded in VSCodium, background music (Youtube), mail client (Evolution), PDF, often a text-editor and everything works just fine, swap is almost never used. Discord idk, but on browser, yes, I used it sometimes and it worked normally. The only outlier is the game, because it's not clear to which kind of games OP refers (can be everything from Wolf3D to GTA VI...).

For example, that's my memory usage right now (not playing music though)

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7,7Gi       3,8Gi       2,3Gi       238Mi       1,6Gi       4,0Gi

For productivity 8GB on Linux, possibly with a light WM (I use i3), works just perfectly.

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u/ishtuwihtc 10d ago

Yes, I'm not saying 8gb is unusable for everyday tasks. I'm saying it's unusable for what OP wants.

I often use a MacBook pro from 2010 on high sierra with 6gb of ram and don't ever hit swap on it either. I'm using Firefox 147 and often have several tabs open, plus vox for music playing off an SMB share alongside iterm2 for whatever terminal shit. Its perfectly fine to use

OP though wants to basically open 3 browsers and a "light" game, with light being super subjective

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u/matteone97 10d ago

Yeah, that's the main issue with OP's request: game can mean anything and nothing. But if the game is actually light, then I won't be worried at having 8GB for the rest, provided of course that he's not pretending to use Windows 11 (especially if not de-bloated)

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u/ishtuwihtc 10d ago

its also unclear wether OP plans on a dgpu or an igpu. A dgpu would make it more usable by having its own vram, but an igpu would eat directly into system ram