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Is 16 gb needed

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IceJoki

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Jul 16, 2013
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Hi All
I'm a newbie here and to Lightroom which I will using on my laptop that runs on a i7 3630QM SSD 8 gb memory and Win 8 my question is will I benefit from upgrading to 16 gb of memory ?
Thank you in advance for any and all help.
IceJoki
 
FWIW: I use Win 7 64 bit with 16 gb ram on my workstation. Even when processing video, with LR5 and LRTimelapse opened and running, I've never even come close to using 16 gb of memory. That said, I'm happy to have the 16 gb even if it is overkill. Will you benefit from 16 gb? Probably not, but memory is pretty inexpensive.
 
Welcome to the forum. Yes, increasing the RAM to 16GB (or more) will help LR performance. The quad core in your CPU though may be more important as would appropriate utilization of the SSD. However. LR will run just fine in the 8GB that you now have. So an answer to your Subject line question is, no it is not needed.

If you have smallish images (10-15 mp) or shoot mostly JPEGs, you might not notice a significant improvement with the added RAM. However, if you have one of the newer DSLRs with 24-36 mp, you might become impatient waiting for LR to chug away at your larger files if you only have 8GB RAM.
 
Simples solution as the Meerkat would say, run all your apps that you would normally have running do the normal jobs that you do etc for however long you would normally do then in LR etc, not after a fresh boot preferably after a few days

Task Manager, Memory tab make sure committed memory is less than your real memory 8GB, if it was 10+ I would think about upgrading
 
Note more memory is always better, but there is a massive law of diminishing returns on your investment. My rule of thumb is to have 3Gb more than you have committed, PC's just run that bit sweeter as a lot of stuff can then be cached for better read write performance (turn on write caching on your disks)
 
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