z77 Pro3 RAM configuration

If you have 8gb of RAM and an application is using more than 8gb of RAM the system begins swapping to the hard disk. As fast as SSDs may be they are still infinitely slower than RAM so the result, even using a fast SSD, is sluggishness and significant slow down. 

Now games tend to be optimized to utilize memory efficiently as well as keep as much data in memory as possible to cut down loading times. The advantage of this is that most of the data held in memory when gaming is not needed in the moment and some of it is barely needed at all so a properly optimized game will swap less used/critical-data to the hard disk and load it back into RAM when needed. The result is significantly less slowdown/stutter. Even with all this optimization however you can have so little RAM that the game is forced to swap critical/common-use data to the hard disk. It is only in that scenario that more RAM will show any kind of benefit in a gaming system. A particularly well optimized game will try to use as much RAM as it can to speed up loading times but actual gameplay and fps will not be any different between say an 16gb system and a 32gb system for the most part.

Now non gaming tasks work a lot different. Something like batch 3d rendering in an application like 3d Studio Max for example will slow down significantly with less RAM. In this case 20-24gb of single channel RAM will provide a performance benefit over 16gb of dual channel RAM as even at half the bandwidth it is still significantly faster than swapping to the hard disk/SSD. The same applies to program compiling and large video encoding/editing tasks. 

In all situations more/faster memory is always king but when talking more/slower vs less/faster the description above applies.

I hope this little write up is of some help. When determining how much RAM I want in a new build, these are the considerations I make.

Basically if you look at RAM usage in the system resource monitor while performing your every day tasks and see less that 20% available (free or in standby mode) RAM then you could benefit from more RAM.

The above screenshot was taken with nothing but a browser and steam loaded on the system. When gaming the used RAM increases to about 6gb in most titles.

As you can see I have 0MB free and 5gb in standby. 8gb in this instance is enough for most of the tasks I perform on this system. If I install another 8gb of RAM I see the free number increase to arround 5gb with the remainder being either in use or on standby. I ideally you want to see at least some free RAM but different OS versions will reserve, or put in standby, more or less RAM. This is on Windows 8.1, with windows 7 more RAM is shown as "free". So long as the tasks you regularly perform do not use more than 80% of your physical RAM you do not need more or at least will see no benefit from it.