Small PC upgrade

Chris Robinson25 said:Maybe in a year or two.
He’ll probably grab a killer GPU and a solid CPU since he already has those.
But looking ahead at more demanding titles, I have a feeling 16GB of RAM is going to be the bare minimum requirement before we even start worrying about the processor or graphics card.
If he picks up a Radeon R9 280 now and already has a quad-core 3.0, he should be set for quite a while.
Even though a 2.5 quad-core is pretty much the standard everywhere right now, I honestly think things will plateau at that level for a bit, rather than games just scaling up endlessly.

Nobody can predict the future, and claiming that games will effectively need 16GB of RAM in just a year or two makes zero sense. Like I said before, 99% of games run perfectly fine on 4GB, and that tiny 1% that "demands" 8GB never actually utilizes the full amount anyway. There is absolutely NO reason to upgrade your RAM right now because by the time games actually require 16GB, you'll likely be looking at a total system overhaul anyway. So there's really no point in speculating and talking this kind of nonsense... 🙄

I’ll play hardware prophet for a second here: I’m calling it now, we won't need more than 8GB of RAM for gaming for at least another six years—so, through 2020. To be clear, I’m not talking about simultaneous heavy rendering, streaming, gaming, and having twenty different browser tabs open at once. I mean just the game itself, the OS, and maybe a background utility or two like MSI Afterburner, Fraps, or TeamSpeak. Even when those massive titles eventually roll around that demand more than 8GB, I'm certain they won't suddenly require 16GB; 8GB will still get the job done perfectly fine.

The beauty of it is that RAM is easily upgraded. You can just pick up more whenever you actually need it.

I went ahead and pulled the trigger on a Dell Latitude 250GB SSD and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda. Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the advice and all the help along the way.

Honestly, 4GB is cutting it pretty close, though I still find it works just fine for my needs. But if you want to actually handle what people call "modern multitasking" or even some heavier workloads, 8GB is really the sweet spot these days.
As far as gaming goes? Not really, I mean, I seriously doubt we’ll be needing more than 8GB to run games for quite a few years yet.