I’m looking at this deal for a prebuilt:
Lenovo LOQ 17IRR9 Tower PC — $749.99
- Intel Core i5-14400F (10 cores, 16 threads, up to 4.7GHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 (8GB GDDR6)
- RAM 16GB DDR5
- 512GB SSD
- PSU 500W
For some context, my PC has a 1070 in it. I’m a budget conscious gamer, usually playing at 1080p. With ram prices skyrocketing and steam betting on steam machines with low vram going forwards, I feel like it’s an okay deal for a guy who upgrades basically never.
It seems like a nice deal to me. Anyone want to talk me out of it?
I feel like this is not a great deal. Keep in mind that ore-builts are in general a gamble. They often advertise the parts that people might now (CPU/GPU) but fill the other parts (PSU, MoBo, RAM, computer case, fans, CPU cooler) with cheap garbage.
Now this PC is $250 short of $1000 (before tax and shipping) and you are getting a low end CPU from an old Intel generation, a mid/low end GPU from a prior generation (only +50% performance compared to the 1070), half the ram capacity you’d want, and absolutely terrible hard drive space at only 512 gb.
You don’t need more than 16GB of RAM.
The only games that list that much in their requirements 1: don’t actually need it and 2: are unoptimized slop you shouldn’t be buying anyways
In my experience it is needed if gaming isnt the only thing you do. Want spotify? Firefox and discord? Maybe another program? You’re out of luck while gaming with 16 ram
I have actually crashed my computer from running out of RAM before, and I had 16GB. Wanna know what I had open? 2 games, a dozen windows of Chrome (one of which was running a Zoom call), plus several other smaller applications. Nobody in their right mind is doing that, nor should they be mad or surprised if their computer crashes when they try.
The biggest non-gaming hit to RAM is going to be Chrome, which runs up to about 1GB of RAM per window. Not per tab, per window. And if you have dozens of windows each with dozens of tabs, Windows starts to move the oldest ones from RAM to storage to avoid using too much RAM. With that, good luck forcing Chrome to go much past 4GB total, even if all those tabs have Youtube videos loaded…
Unless you and your friends are doing a lot of screensharing, you’re probably not getting Discord much past 0.5GB, same with Spotify. Let’s be real generous and give it 2GB total between the 2.
That means there’s 16-6=10GB left for Windows and a game, if you’re doing all of these bad habits outlined above. Even then, not a lot of games use that much RAM. I actually do all of the bad habits I’ve outlined above regularly, and I very rarely go past 16GB on my system (I have 32GB total).
I repeat, nobody in their right mind needs more than 16GB of RAM.