Is it time to move to 32GB for normal office workers or nah?
Posted by bgr2258@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 51 comments
I just upgraded an accountant to 32GB and his immediate reaction was "wow, startup and opening outlook was exponentially faster"
cjcox4@reddit
nah.
For the same reasons as why that office worker doesn't need 16c/32t.
And no, it could not have been "exponentially faster" IMHO. Not saying it wasn't faster though, but probably for other reasons.
Stonewalled9999@reddit
TBH I bet Finance bro hadn't rebooted in 2 years and the full power off to add RAM was the real "speedy speedy"
FrankNicklin@reddit
£150 for DDR4 16gb and 180 for ddr5. It’s crazy pricing now.
Stonewalled9999@reddit
I have 2 DDR4 16GB SODIMMS here I will be taking offers on :)
MeridianNL@reddit
The memory price over the 4-5 years they use it and the lesser user experience with smaller memory sizes is not worth it in my opinion. Our new batch of laptops are going to be 128GB for this reason.
JebediahKerman4999@reddit
128GB? Wow, what's the line of work?
MeridianNL@reddit
Mainly developers. Strix Halo laptops.
JebediahKerman4999@reddit
Oh, our java developers make do with 16 💀
Stonewalled9999@reddit
bet it makes them better coders doesn't it :)
bgr2258@reddit (OP)
Big spender! 💲💲🤣 (These days, anyway)
JBD_IT@reddit
How many tabs in firefox do they usually have open?
Stonewalled9999@reddit
its more likely the 30 edgeview that runs for every Teams chat tbh
PhilosophyBitter7875@reddit
There is no correct baseline answer for this since every office is different.
We have regular WIN11 25H2 email & powerpoint machines that are Opti-3070's with 16GB and they rarely go over 50%. But that is probably the limit of capabilities for those tiny little guys.
Stonewalled9999@reddit
put 25H2 on there and watch ALL your RAM get gobbled up
Stonewalled9999@reddit
Is this a made up story - accountants here are "8GB is plenty for people"
MalletNGrease@reddit
I've 16GB.
Doesn't seem like extravagant use and my total usage is already at 85%. I'd make the standard 32GB.
malikto44@reddit
I would say yes, if you can afford it. AI stuff is very RAM hungry, and every $DEITY-damned thing is getting bloated with AI stuff, even stuff that shouldn't get even near any LLMs. Of course EDR/XDR/MDR stuff is also filled with this, so I would consider upgrading other stuff on the machine as well. Not just starting with 32 gigs, but going with a TB of drive space, and perhaps a few more cores, since the EDR/XDR/MDR program is likely going to require more I/O than it has already.
DStandsForCake@reddit
I find it quite insane that 32 GB of RAM is the "requirement" today in a tolerable Windows environment for doing nothing more special than having a Teams meeting and a web browser open.
Privately I sit with my CachyOS (as well as the 32GB DDR4), and it basically never takes up more than 4-5 GB of RAM, maybe a little more if I'm working with GIMP.
dpf81nz@reddit
not at the moment with ram prices they way they are
FastFredNL@reddit
I upgraded from 16 to 32GB 2 weeks ago. Only stuff I have open is Teams, max 10 Edge tabs, Remote Desktop Manager, and a Citrix session, still burned 80-90% of RAM with 16GB.
Intune managed Windows 11 machine with Defender active on it...
Drew707@reddit
I use my 16GB laptop essentially as an RDP client plus some. I currently have two sessions, Teams, Outlook, and two browser tabs open, plus one File Explorer window, and I am sitting at 72%. There is no way my actual workload would work on this. All that is handled by the workstation in my garage with 256GB that hosts a few Hyper-V VMs for real work.
Justsomedudeonthenet@reddit
It would be, if it weren't for AI gobbling up all the RAM.
We're looking at having to cut back to 8GB models because the 16GB ones we were getting have doubled in price. It sucks.
Feeling-Tutor-6480@reddit
Don't do it, we sized up the standard laptop usage with only 3 apps (outlook, teams and edge) and it was 12gb. Add in modern screens and that is almost 14gb.
The damn device will page 90% of the time
Ssakaa@reddit
On the upside, I'm sure all the AI vibe-coded features vendors add over the next 3 years are definitely going to reduce memory footprint...
Justsomedudeonthenet@reddit
A slow laptop works a lot better than no laptop at all. And if prices keep going the way people are saying they will, those might well be our only options.
Phlynn42@reddit
an employee costs 50-80k a year, buying them a 1500$ laptop instead of a 700$ one will pay for its self. dont look at IT costs in a vacuum
Justsomedudeonthenet@reddit
I work at a non profit. The employees don't cost 80k a year. And even if they do, unfortunately we are at the mercy of what money our donors give us.
Feeling-Tutor-6480@reddit
We get global pricing from Dell and already since December they have gone up by 20% I am not sure where this will end up either, may go to 30
OregonTechHead@reddit
Not in this market
Pixel91@reddit
If you ask the guy again in half a year, he'll complain about how slow everything is.
The placebo effect with hardware upgrades is real.
bgr2258@reddit (OP)
This is a very valid point. In 6 months he may not even remember we upgraded and be asking for a new computer 🤷♂️
Denver80211@reddit
The most recent batch of machines we purchased had all 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB hard drives. Less because of need and more because it's the same cost as the prior batch of machines with half as much of each. Sure I could go slightly lower on per machine cost, maybe get one or two more but frankly I would rather go up in specs than stay flat.
223454@reddit
More memory alone doesn't speed up load times, unless it was maxed out and using swap/page file. You would need to check memory usage to see how much is being used. It's possible the new memory was bigger AND faster.
Impressive_Army3767@reddit
Nah. If be replacing that steaming pile of shite called Outlook though
Honolulu-Blues@reddit
32Gb of ram to boot an OS that requires only 4?
MrCatberry@reddit
Single Channel... Dual Channel...
2x 8GB can be more snappy than 1x 16GB.
bgr2258@reddit (OP)
In this case it was an upgrade from 2x8 to 2x16, so already dual
imightbetired@reddit
CL timing and frequency can also matter with a lot of programs. I first thought exactly like u/MrCatberry but if that person already had dual channel, the other specs of the RAM can explain it. Also placebo...just knowing that the RAM amount increased made that person say it's faster. If you didn't test it somehow...this can also be the explanation. Having more RAM won't make the startup of the pc faster, or a program (Outlook) unless the RAM itself is faster, or perhaps XMP profile was not even enabled in the past and now it is.
BedRevolutionary8458@reddit
Yeah at this point yeah tbh. We're at the point where the ai everywhere and bad coding and web browser bloat has made 16 gigs kinda iffy
Opening-Routine@reddit
The better choice would be going for MacOS or some flavour of Linux. But throwing money at it and going for more RAM is definitely easier.
the_doughboy@reddit
Yes but only because of Intel putting the RAM on the CPU.
With all of the Enterprise protection apps that I load on a laptop I'm easily using up 6 to 8GB of RAM, which makes 16GB of RAM not that much. 24GB, available on Macs and formerly on Wintel is the sweet spot right now, but since Intel doesn't make chips with 24GB we're doing 32GB of RAM.
ZookeepergameIll6836@reddit
We moved them last year when the prices were really really really cheap.. now just hoping they would come down so we can get more. but don't see that happening.
GullibleDetective@reddit
12 or 16 is f8ne for most non power users
AegorBlake@reddit
I mean I'd say it's time to find a better OS and better security tools
funktopus@reddit
For the "power" users that's what were looking at. We have one group that has a legitimate need for more memory and a few users that could use it but in reality need to reboot at least once a week.
OkayArbiter@reddit
Title could be better worded as "Is it time to move to $4,000 laptops for normal office workers or nah?"
Vendors I deal with are expected business-grade laptops to double in price by this time next year (with 30-50% jumps in the next three months alone).
ArborlyWhale@reddit
Nah.
Something else was wrong if that made a large difference.
siedenburg2@reddit
We have mostly 8gb machines and the regular ram usage on those is at 40-60%.
Our main software isn't a big webapp that loads infinitely and causes 10gb+ browser ram usage and without other "webapps" like teams it's no problem. Sad that the modern dev world doesn't want to produce optimized code anymore because it takes time and is so hard.
nocturnal@reddit
Yes. We moved to 32GB a while back.
SpotlessCheetah@reddit
Yeah. B/c soon, you'll be asking for 64gb and guess what...they're already all gone or not making them widely and SPOT pricing for mem is going up.
If you were to get the new upcoming Lenovo T14 Gen 7 with LPCAMM2, the cost to upgrade to 64gb on spot pricing is $1,000 just for the LPCAMM2.
Aware_Novel_5141@reddit
Yes! 32 gb is the new norm