I got 32 additional GB of ram at a low, low cost from someone. What can I actually do with it?
700 Chrome tabs, a very bloated IDE, an Android emulator, a VM, another Android emulator, a bunch of node.js processes (and their accompanying chrome processes)
Here’s what you can do with your impressive 64 GB of RAM:
Store approximately 8.1 quintillion (that’s 8,100,000,000,000,000) zeros! Yes, that’s right, an endless ocean of nothingness that will surely bring balance to the universe.
Unless something’s gone over my head here, this is off by around 6 orders of magnitude.
A long sequence of zeros compresses really well :)
Run a local LLM
The best thing about having a lot of RAM is that you can have a ton of apps open with a ton of windows without closing them or slowing down. I have an unreasonable number of browser windows and tabs open because that’s my equivalent to bookmarking something to come back and read it later. It’s similar to if you’re the type of person for whom stuff accumulates on flat surfaces cause you just set stuff down intending to deal with it later. My desk is similarly cluttered with books, bills, accessories, etc.
Yeah this is exactly me. Also a quick tip, if you’re on windows, there are some registry tweaks you can do to help prevent the GUI slowing down when lots of programs are open at once.
Be in virtual machine heaven
I used to have a batch file to create a ram disk and mirror my Diablo3 install to it. The game took a bit longer to start up but map load times were significantly shorter.
I don’t know if any modern games would fit and have enough loads to really care…but you could
Keep it and wait for the applications to bloat up. You won’t feel like you have an excessive amount of RAM in a few years.
Depends… If it’s DDR5 it might not work with the other stick… I was unable to add on another 64GB to my desktop a last year and had to eventually just buy a whole new 128GB set.
You could build another computer/server and self host things…
It’s DDR4, I’m too poor to upgrade right now. Doubt I’d benefit from it much anyway. I am thinking of building a server however. I have most of the parts minus a power supply.
You can run AI Models in it. Probably ones with 70b or up to 60b of you want to do other stuff while running them.
I built my PC recently and splurged to get about 100gb of ddr5, thinking it was going to be a waste of money.
I couldn’t have been more wrong, there are occasionally times when I’m almost running out of memory. How? Multiple desktops, each with tons of programs and stuff open, including probably like several hundred Firefox tabs open at the worst of times.
Basically, extra ram has allowed me to kinda postpone the responsibility of having the close programs, maintain cleanliness, etc. I still have to stay organised using desktops so I don’t go crazy with the number of things I have open, but I’m the limiting factor here, not my computer. And that’s a super liberating feeling.
TL;DR: you can NEVER have too much ram.
Does it have RGB? If not just bin it. It is worthless anyway.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
More than I could do on my Apple IIe at 64k.
I have 64 and am about to upgrade to 128GB
I run windows in a VM. Nothing heavy, just to test some things on the shitty windows systems
I run multiple databases, MySQL, PostgreSQL, redis, MongoDB, memcached, all with extra memory available, for development
I run a large array of services directly and in docker containers. Transmission web, the ARR suite, jellyfin, next cloud, immich, onlyofffice, various PHP apps, the list goes on.
8GB is the bare minimum if you only browse 16GB Is the bare minimum if you also run other apps 32GB Is a good amount to work with 64GB is a requirement if you do development or have a lot of services 128GB is a normal amount for a developer
Open 10 extra tabs in chrome
LOL, maybe If I used Chrome.
An extra 20 Firefox tabs
♾️ extra Orion tabs
In my case, it’s less about being able to open more Firefox tabs and more about Firefox being able to go longer between crashes due to a memory leak. (I know, I know… Firefox doesn’t have memory leaks anymore. It’s probably due to an extension or some bad JavaScript in one of my perpetually-open sites or something. One of these days I’ll get around to troubleshooting it…)
If it’s any consolation, I also get this from Firefox when I leave tabs open for a long time.