So massive RAM size is just from it being cheap right?

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While I'm guilty of having more RAM than I can actually notice any usage for I can't help but wonder if anybody actually and truly can say more RAM helps them. I had 4Gb in my laptop for over a year so I upgraded to 6Gb when a 4gb stick hit like $15 quite a while back and can't say I've ever noticed a difference on that. I figured with my desktop it would be more likely for me to see a difference since everything is faster in that anyway. I went from 4gb to 8gb and can't honestly say I ever actually see a difference.

Both my desktop and my laptop have ALWAYS had Intel SSD's in them. Having an SSD probably makes the RAM upgrade a bit less noticeable but I truly dont know. The SSD purchases have honestly been the only actual upgrade I've noticed in YEARS. I dont play many games but civ 5 does actually run better with the 8gb RAM but that thing eats up system resources like crazy. Normally when I feel like gaming I pull up my Xbox or my PS3 just because thats what my friends have

[Gizmokid2005]

Once I hit the 6GB ram number, it really stopped being a noticeable difference. It does allow me to do more at a time, I've actually gotten up to 14GB ram usage a few times recently, but that's not a normal occurrence.

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I've seen my resource usage go up over 6gb a couple times but that was just when I was leaving EVERYTHING open. even right now I have both firefox and chrome open along with dreamweaver, photoshop and a bunch of other oddball stuff open and I'm under 4gb still. I'm switching back to dual monitors and that'll bring my memory usage up quite a bit because then I'll have crap open on both of those screens.

[knight0334]

I use my 8gb quite often looking at large maps, having a couple online work order billing/tracking windows, and several pdf open. Our online work order thingy has some java embedded which will just start choking even a top of the line machine after pricing out about 100 lines of items.

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but thats 8Gb.... look around at systems these days 16gb is VERY common and all the triple channel rigs are at 12 or more.

Java does destroy RAM.