by When shopping for components to build a new PC, gamers always wonder how many sticks to buy and how much RAM will be enough for their workload and game. Developers have been improving their games graphically over the years and because of this, the minimum system requirements have increased as well.
A few years ago, most games required 4GB of RAM. This was later increased to 8GB, but many triple-A games now require 16GB to run smoothly.
In order to run games at higher FPS, the system needs specifications higher than the minimums that can handle heavy loads without much effort. However, the amount of RAM required for a gaming PC also depends on the type of games the user is playing.
16GB of RAM is the sweet spot for most gaming PCs
The purpose of the component is to store short-term data that the system needs to operate and this is reset every time the system restarts. In modern games, graphic elements need to be saved so that they can be called up quickly when a new area needs to be loaded. With a higher RAM capacity, the system can store more game data at once and help in increasing the FPS, but the speed and configuration of the RAM also plays a big role.
If you are a casual gamer playing single player games or if you are a competitive gamer playing e-sports games, 16GB is enough for both types of games. However, readers need to be warned that random access memory is not a component that boosts the graphics performance of the PC as much as the graphics card. A GPU upgrade will boost FPS the most and help the latest games run smoothly, and a strong processor will have the second biggest impact on performance.
Your system is capable of running the latest games on high settings with just 16GB of RAM installed, assuming all other components are fast enough. More RAM is recommended for higher resolution games as high resolution textures are larger and require more accessible storage. Even then, 16GB is enough as most of the heavy load is handled by the GPU and CPU.
Before upgrading your RAM, you need to make sure that it is compatible with your system and you should also check that you have enough free slots to install the sticks. There are different generations of the component (e.g. DDR3, DDR4 or the latest DDR5) and each generation is faster than the previous one. It is also important to note that they are not backward compatible. Consult your motherboard manual to check which generation it supports.
Second, if your motherboard and CPU only support RAM at a certain speed, buying higher speed sticks is a waste of money. For example, if your motherboard and CPU support 1666MHz RAM, installing 2133MHz sticks won’t help as they will only run at a maximum speed of 1666MHz.
