PC GPU died, need help with what to go for next

[Soukyuu]

Yes, if you only play FFXIV, you won't be close to 4gig of usage. But if you play in window mode, with a music player running, web pages, some other tools, you do get close to 4gig.

I don't know which programs you are using, but I never hit the pagefile in daily use/gaming. I wasn't even close to the 3GB mark, except when compressing something with 7zip at custom settings.

Currently, with Chrome open, my music playing, my messenger being on, AV running, torrent downloading and ffxiv running I am at +-2GB RAM usage. Commit is at 2157MB

It's all about how clean your system is and how much crapware you install. Yes, getting 8GB won't cost you much more, but saying it's the minimum amount is simply wrong. 4GB is more than enough.

maybe for too long. take a closer look at your usage not just the little green bar. 4086 is 4GB your system has already Comited/allocated 4073 of that.

You don't seem to be aware win7 is using all available RAM a fixed percentage of RAM for speeding up HDD access. So the more RAM you have in your machine, the more will be used. This used RAM will be freed in case you need it, so going just by that number is not reliable.

Also, win8 will NOT be removing programs from RAM until it's full, so those numbers will only become more confusing as time goes by. (at least the Metro ones, just like Android and iOS do)

[Randelmire]

I don't know which programs you are using, but I never hit the pagefile in daily use/gaming. I wasn't even close to the 3GB mark, except when compressing something with 7zip at custom settings.

Steam, Chrome, Winamp, MSN Messenger, Avast, sometimes Photoshop (yes, I agree it may seem abusive, but some times I take screenshots and edit them right away), Motioninjoy, Dropbox, Microsoft Excel, Mumble.

You should know that I don't only do gaming with that computer. Depending on what I do, I often go over 4gig usage. (Virtual machines, image and video editing, etc...) Other games in the future may have to use more ram too.

Anyway, by going with 4 gig right now, you may be fine, but maybe in a year or two you will need an upgrade. Why not pay about 15 or 20$ more right away and get 8gb instead of 4gb, if you are already going to buy a gaming computer that will cost you a few hundreds?

Last time I asked myself that question was about 4 years ago. At that time, I agree that 4gb was more than enough, but not today. Not for a gaming computer.

You don't seem to be aware win7 is using all available RAM a fixed percentage of RAM for speeding up HDD access. So the more RAM you have in your machine, the more will be used. This used RAM will be freed in case you need it, so going just by that number is not reliable.

Well, that does mean that you are using more than 4gig in that case. If Windows must free up some of the space used to speed up HDD read, it means you loose that feature.

[Disc]

maybe for too long. take a closer look at your usage not just the little green bar. 4086 is 4GB your system has already Comited/allocated 4073 of that. that leaves you with 4099mb for your programs to play with. 1.5gb is already used up by ff14 that leaves you with 1.5 gigs left.

Tell me if you only need 4GB, why is it you have 8GB?

Edit: So your using a Paging file....once you hit the max allocate memory that leaves you with 3MB left, your system will be forced to use that swapfile.

I have 4GB RAM, I've never gone over 3.5GB in use at one time. And that was with a Windows XP virtual machine allocated 2GB RAM. I didn't just accept 4GB as the standard because somebody told me it was, I tested & tracked my own use.

Gamer's & casual user's do not need more than 4GB.

Anyway, by going with 4 gig right now, you may be fine, but maybe in a year or two you will need an upgrade. Why not pay about 15 or 20$ more right away and get 8gb instead of 4gb, if you are already going to buy a gaming computer that will cost you a few hundreds?

Because gaming isn't going to require more than 4GB RAM any time soon. And you can put more money into your GPU/CPU/SSD/display by avoiding excess spending in areas that won't impact actual performance.