Is 32gb ram overkill?

[Star Ark]

Currently running 4gb of ram and just bought ni komplete ultimate 10. Unfortunately now i can only run 3 guitar tracks and one instance of abbey road modern drummer so im buying a new pc too. Does 4 times the ram simply mean i could run 12 guitar chains and 4 vsts as sample heavy as modern drummer? So 32 gb would definitely be enough but is it worthless? Or are we talking about a combination of cpu and ram requirements i should meet? Guitar chain is an amp sim from amplitube 3 and guitar rig 5 cabpro as speaker sim - that's it. Using metal foundry and lecto i was getting 4 or even 5 times the amount of tracks before overload.

 

[The-Zeronaut]

Things like superior drummer or kontakt (sample based) are gonna require more ram (and possible an SSD hard drive) to be faster
but for vst plugins is mostly cpu power.

Nowadays i wouldn't buy a computer with less than 16gb ddr4 ram so 32gb doesn't seem crazy at all.

those guys using 150-250 track orchestral templates are using monsters with 128gb ram or things like that.

 

[AntonioPetrole]

32gb might be overkill but luckily ram isn't super expensive. It all depends if your bottleneck is memory or CPU. Right now your probably throttled by memory and once you increase your memory and tracks, you will probably max your CPU before you ever touch 32gb of ram. But I would say depends on your workload as Zeronaut mentioned. You could always do 16gb and then upgrade if you're still having issues (which I doubt). I've been running only 8gb for a long time now and never have memory issues, but I also don't use a ton of VSTi's outside of Superior/SSD

 

[Star Ark]

Thanks guys that was exactly the kind of advice i needed!

 

[johnny ForTiorI]

i also use NI Modern Drummer and have 8Gb of RAM. i can run that and a dozen of TH3 instances without any trouble. so i also think 32 might be a bit overkill. for video editing you´d need a lot, but for music 12 would be plenty.

 

[H-evolve]

For a living , I'm a mechanical engineer . I have a speciality in computer simulation and it is very ram extensive . I'm saying this because I know that what I do is a shit tone more ram extensive than mixing music and I only need more than 16 Gb for very complicated simulations .

Too long, didn't read : in my opinion , it's overkill .

 

[newamerikangospel]

I built a 16G ram computer 7 years ago, and thought I was catching way ahead of the potential curve. Then I got into Kontakt instruments. A SSD goes a long way if you manipulate how much of the sample pools are cached vs streamed at need, but I started to hit issues with ram that caused me to start unloading mic positions. With most sampled libraries (specifically kontakt), 16G is going to be filled up pretty fast if you are trying to do orchestral and/or have an layering setup going. But moreover, the question is "Should I spend the extra money?". If you were more involved in hard handed sample libraries and the difference was $80-$120, absolutely yes. But unless you are wanting to try to get into, With your uses, I would suggestion getting the best 16G you can, not opting for mediocre 32G sets. Ram isn't really what you are running into issues with, just using "regular" vsts and drum samples.

 

[newamerikangospel]

Additionally, NI released stuff is generally really good with resources. The 3rd parties libraries are where you will get crazy sample pools and cache loads (Spitfire Brass clocking in at 102G uncompressed)

 

[Pxz]

Just wondering , what ram brands are bad and which ones are more recommendable?

 

[H-evolve]

Just wondering , what ram brands are bad and which ones are more recommendable?

I think Corsair and Kingston are reliable brands. But I am sure there are even more performant brands. I don't know if it still exists, but some years back, there was also Crucial as a good choice.

 

[Novocaine]

Computer dummy here. If I have an HDD and SSD drives, should I store all my samples on the SSD drive? should the raw tracks go in there as well? do the HDD and SSD correspond to different drives in the computer, like D: and C:? planning on finally getting a decent PC.

 

[LIIKET]

Computer dummy here. If I have an HDD and SSD drives, should I store all my samples on the SSD drive? should the raw tracks go in there as well? do the HDD and SSD correspond to different drives in the computer, like D: and C:? planning on finally getting a decent PC.

Stuff you need to access with fast load times on a regular basis, like the operating system and preferably big sample libraries, should go on the SSD. Remember that the benefit of an SSD is the reduced latency when moving stuff from disc to RAM. After the initial load there is no performance increase, obviously because the data is already in RAM.
The HDD and SSD should map to different volumes by default if you don't setup something crazy like spanned volumes.

 

[newamerikangospel]

Stuff you need to access with fast load times on a regular basis, like the operating system and preferably big sample libraries, should go on the SSD. Remember that the benefit of an SSD is the reduced latency when moving stuff from disc to RAM. After the initial load there is no performance increase, obviously because the data is already in RAM.
The HDD and SSD should map to different volumes by default if you don't setup something crazy like spanned volumes.

This. With how cheap smaller SSD drives are becoming, I put my OS on a 120g, my most used/more intense kontakt libraries on a second SSD and my smaller ones and all other functions (recording to, vsts, etc) on my HDD. I also back up my kontakt libraries on the HDD.