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)