Should I buy more frames?

Need a quick reality check on whether I should grab another stick of RAM or if I'm just chasing ghosts. Looking at Task Manager, my memory usage sits at a steady 40-50% minimum, assuming the thing is actually reading right.

The setup: i5 4460, already running two 4GB sticks (1866MHz), MSI GTX 750.

Not gaming much lately—though that might change 🙂—but my main heavy lifting is just programming. I’ve got Adobe Visual Studio open, two browsers with a mountain of tabs, and a bunch of other background junk.

I'm not sure if an extra 4GB would even move the needle, or if I should just hold off since RAM prices seem higher than they used to be. Thoughts? 🙂

Unused RAM is just wasted space, so if you've got about 50% breathing room, you probably don't need more.

Maybe spend that money on an SSD instead if you haven't upgraded yet.

Yeah, but I’m saying in a typical workflow it hits about 40%. Sure, if I fire up Inkscape alongside AutoCAD, or if I’ve got like 100 tabs open or something x (which, let's be honest, isn't exactly a daily thing), then usage spikes.



This is what's tripping me up. This is what "average" usage looks like on my machine. I don't get why "in use" is sitting at 4.5 gigs when the total sum of all my apps is just over 1 gig. Look, I get that there are other background processes, but we're talking about a 3.5 gig gap here. It feels like everything is just vanishing into a black hole. Maybe I'm just missing something obvious lately.🙂

So, I've got the forum pulled up and my RAM usage is sitting at about 51%—even though I'm running on a single 8GB stick. Keep in mind, I've got uTorrent running in the background to seed some files, plus my antivirus and all that good stuff... It seems totally normal to me, so there's really nothing to worry about.