How Much RAM Do You Really Need?

TL;DR - For the Skimmers 

How much RAM do church computers need? Can you have too much? Let’s answer those and other questions about this controversial topic. 

• Why trust ChurchComputers.com? 

• The history of ‘more RAM is better’ 

• Is more RAM really better? 

• Enter SSDs 

• More is NOT always better 

• Sometimes more IS better 

• We’ve done the homework for you! 

Here’s our comprehensive article explaining just how much RAM you need and why, and how we can help you purchase the best church computers for your needs. 

READ MORE Below 

When you are setting out to purchase or specify a new computer system, one of the first questions you encounter is how much RAM (Random Access Memory) you need. There are some notable exceptions, but modern PC systems generally offer several configurations featuring differing amounts of memory and storage. 

It can often be confusing to determine how much of either component you really need, but in this article we will focus on assessing your need for system memory, or RAM. (Spoiler alert: It may not be as much as you think!)

[Please note the distinction between those two terms: 

1. Storage is what we commonly refer to as the ‘hard drive’—though that is often an SSD (Solid State Drive) these days—where items you keep available long-term are stored. 

2. Memory is the location where short-term files—the operating system (OS), applications, and documents you are actively using—are stored while the computer is running, and they are cleared when you shut the system down. 

Ironically, we only refer to the main system memory as ‘RAM’ despite the fact that most modern computers use SSDs as long-term storage devices, which are also composed of a special type of ‘random access’ memory chips that share many of the same characteristics as RAM.]

Why Should You Trust This Article?

Before we dive into the details of assessing what you need, it might be helpful to understand why you can take this advice seriously and trust it. And just as it was appropriate and useful for the apostle Paul to lay out his credentials to the Philippians, I think it’s valuable for me to do the same so that you know that I did not just make this up or read it last week on some random website. 

You see, my use of personal computers began in the 1980’s with computers that had 1 or 2K (Kilo-bytes!) of RAM, and has continued up through Megabytes (MB) in the ‘90s and ‘00s, and now the Gigabytes (GB) that modern systems offer. I studied electronics in the ‘80s, and then studied Electrical and Computer Engineering in my college years. 

And I’ve spent the past four decades using at least a half dozen operating systems on a wide range of computer hardware in the fields of audio production, photo and video editing, graphic design, CAD and industrial controls, and all manner of web, networking, and programming tasks. 

So I’ve “been there, done that, and have the T-shirt”. (Several of them, in fact!) During this time, I’ve witnessed massive changes in the underlying technology behind both memory and storage, and I’ve seen how those developments have significantly changed how each is used.

If you are someone who would rather just be told what to do rather than understand it, and you want to skip to the place where we tell you exactly what to do, you might be disappointed and probably should stop here, because the TL;DR of how much RAM you should buy is this: It depends. (Unsatisfying, I know.)

But if you stick with me, by the end of this article you should have a much better idea of what factors your needs depend on, why you do (or don’t) need a certain amount of RAM, and a strategy for purchasing that will cover your needs now and in the future while still being a good steward of the resources you have been entrusted with.

Why Do People Think that ‘More RAM is Better?’

Before we look at the current situation, it is important to look back at the history which has informed so many of the perspectives and opinions that we still hold today, and to see how modern systems make many of those old ‘rules’ obsolete. 

In early generations of computer hardware and operating systems, RAM was the only ‘fast’ way to store anything (relatively speaking), and it wasn’t uncommon for users to set up a ‘RAM drive’ app to cache some of the frequently used content that would otherwise be read from very slow floppy disks or early hard drives. 

The RAM disk app would use a chunk of RAM to ‘pretend’ to be another disk drive and load the most important files needed to maximize speed. Those early operating systems often couldn’t efficiently use all the available RAM anyway, so this arrangement put that ‘extra’ fast RAM to good use—and having more was better. 

More RAM Really IS Better?!?

By the early ‘00s, PC disk drives had become fast enough—and software (including the operating systems) had grown large enough—that it became useful to store some of the contents of RAM onto the hard drive to free up more space in physical memory. 

Now, instead of the OS dividing up the limited memory ‘pie’ using a direct allocation and giving each application exclusive access to the entire range of memory space that it requested, it could create larger ‘imaginary’ ranges of memory for every app, and then it could move data between ‘real’ memory chips and the ‘cached’ storage on a hard drive in the background (as needed) to keep everything running as if there was a much larger amount of real, physical RAM installed. 

This new memory management scheme was called ‘virtual memory’, and it allowed many more applications to run at the same time than would be possible if every application had its own exclusive chunk of RAM.

When using virtual memory management, the operating system is actually ‘tricking’ the applications, because behind the scenes it is actively managing and assigning fictitious (‘virtual’) memory ranges to apps, and when one application really needs all of the space it was allocated (which isn’t often), the system moves things around—swapping some ‘pages’ of information to the disk or back into RAM—to ensure that the apps can access enough RAM to get their work done without monopolizing more than is necessary. 

Of course, this introduces some performance degradation because those swaps take time and the disk is nowhere near as fast as the ‘real’ RAM, but it allows a whole new range of possibilities by enabling the most efficient use of the limited physical memory.

‘Virtual memory’ did get an (oft-deserved) bad reputation, however, among those who needed to push the system's performance, and because of this, the “more RAM is better” mantra remained true wherever possible and practical.

SSDs Have Changed Everything

Around 15 years ago, a new type of ‘hard drive’ storage became more available to the masses, which has greatly influenced how PCs use and manage memory—the SSD, or Solid State Drive. They are named that because, unlike traditional ‘spinning-rust’ hard disk drives (HDDs), which use spinning platters of magnetic material and heads that move across the surface of the platter to read and write the data, an SSD has no moving parts. Instead, they use… memory chips! 

The kind of memory which is used in SSDs is a different type of memory design that can persistently store data without keeping power supplied to the chips, and they are still significantly slower than modern generations of RAM technology—which itself has increased in speed by orders of magnitude beyond where it was a couple of decades ago. But fundamentally, both SSDs and RAM use random-access memory chips to store data in their own ways. 

The reason SSDs have had such an impact on memory use, and the reason we are discussing them here, is their greatly enhanced read and write speeds, which exceed even the best hard drives. While the virtual memory systems of the ‘00s were often slow and caused noticeable performance decreases, modern memory management systems running on the latest generation of CPUs, coupled with fast SSD storage and even faster RAM, can perform so well with low amounts of RAM that the impact is often not even detectable. 

This is aided even further by the vastly improved capacity of modern CPUs to perform near-real-time file compression—so inactive data in RAM is now compressed in the background to make more room in the installed physical RAM. 

Combined, these factors have made the user experience in modern OS environments much more comfortable and productive while using less RAM than before. And when RAM is as scarce and expensive as it is becoming, that can make a big difference in how you determine what to purchase.

Skewering a Sacred Cow — More is Not Always Better

With all of the above background and explanation, you might begin to understand why previous ‘Rules of Thumb’ or ‘general wisdom’ really don’t apply the way they used to. The conditions that led to many of those perceptions are no longer present, and the idea that ‘more is better’ is less applicable than ever. 

Here are a few reasons why having more RAM than you really need might be counterproductive:

• There is a threshold on many systems where RAM speed decreases as you add more RAM modules. This is most common when using four DIMMs instead of one or two. The system will automatically reduce the bus speed if more DIMMs are present, because it’s harder to keep four separate RAM ‘sticks’ synchronized than two. If you really need the additional memory, it's worth the tradeoff. But if you don’t, why slow things down unnecessarily?

• Having more RAM often means more potential failure points. The more RAM modules you have installed, the greater the likelihood that a single failure will crash the entire system. 

• The more RAM you have, the larger the hibernation file that is written and read, so using the Hibernate feature will take longer every time.

• As of this writing (mid 2026), the price of RAM is astronomical, and there is no indication it will change any time soon! Shifting your budget to get more RAM than you really need will usually result in a compromise on other system specifications, and, as we’ve shown above, the overall performance of a system is highly dependent on an appropriate balance of a solid CPU, a fast SSD, and sufficient fast RAM. Sacrificing the first two to get too much of the last will negatively impact the system's overall performance.

Another reason that we often hear for adding lots of RAM is to ‘future-proof’ the system. Unfortunately, this is misguided as there is no such thing as ‘future-proofing’. Adding an excessive amount of RAM to a system today only means that several years down the road you’ll have an old system with lots of old, outdated RAM. 

Having more won’t make it ‘just as good’ as future systems. A better purchasing strategy is to plan for a reasonably useful lifespan of the system—typically three to five years—and plan to replace it at that time with current technology of that era. 

If the system is sufficiently capable for longer than that, so much the better! But if not, you won’t have overspent so badly that you feel compelled to stick with your now-outdated system with lots of not-so-future-proof parts. Besides, there is no guarantee that more RAM will be required in the future than it is now.

(Example: The same 8GB systems that struggled with Windows 7 usually ran much better after being upgraded to Windows 10, because it manages memory better.)

But Sometimes More RAM is Still Better

Despite the many reasons we’ve laid out here for not pushing the limits on RAM expense, there are some cases where it does make sense to purchase more RAM than a typical 8 or 16GB system:

• You are purchasing a system which has no future RAM upgrade options. This is not currently the norm, particularly in desktop systems, but some of the latest types of RAM (LPDDR5X for example) run at such fast speeds that mounting them on a card in a slot hinders their performance—so they are soldered permanently to the motherboard and cannot be changed later. In these cases, the RAM you get is really, really fast, but since you will never have the option to add more or swap it out for larger modules in the future, you have to guess how much you will ever need and then live with it. (This is most often becoming the case with high-end laptops.)

• Your computer has graphics hardware which uses part of the system RAM, and the highest performance can only be achieved with dual-channel memory (Intel Iris Xe, for example). This does not apply to any of the systems we sell, but there are some systems—particularly laptops—where this would apply, and due to the shared memory usage and need for dual channels (usually dual memory modules), the minimum will usually start at 16GB and go up from there.

• You plan to use the system for very demanding applications and content. Most of the applications listed below frequently use large files which need to be loaded into RAM along with other power-hungry tools and plugins:

  • Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom (or many of the other Adobe suite of apps)

  • Heavy use of video switching or editing apps (like OBS, DaVinci Resolve, etc)

  • 3D modeling or graphics applications

  • Most high-end photo editing applications

  • AAA or AAAA video games (We see you secret CoD and GTA fans!)

  • MS Flight Simulator (It’s very resource intensive)

  • Running virtual machines

  • Doing anything with Virtual Reality

• Someone just donated a huge bag of cash and told you to “go crazy and buy the best thing possible” (Hey, it could happen!)

We’ve Done the Homework for You!

The last case above notwithstanding, most of our customers are trying to be wise stewards of ministry resources, and it’s important to make decisions based on current facts and not outdated information. We have already conducted testing and research to configure PC systems that we know will perform well when running our software across various environments. So if a system is listed on our store as being designed for use with MediaShout 7, you can expect it to run that well for the foreseeable future, and you don’t need to worry about it having enough RAM. 

The 8GB of RAM in our Standard and Signature desktop systems works very well for the vast majority of MediaShout use cases and serves as a solid baseline for most general-purpose computing tasks. We specify 16GB as the base amount in our Pro systems not because MediaShout needs it, but because we anticipate users will run other, more power-hungry software alongside MediaShout, and they intend for that PC to be a production workhorse. 

A notable exception to these cases is that the RAM in our laptop bundle is not upgradable, so we have specified a little extra on that system (16GB) to stay on the safe side. Obviously, if you intend to run other more intensive applications on any of these systems, you will need to research the system requirements of that software. 

It’s comforting to know that desktop computer RAM upgrades are relatively easy to install in only a few minutes. So if you are looking at our MediaShout desktop computer bundles and are worried about not having enough RAM, you can ease your concerns by knowing they all come with at least one additional DIMM slot for adding more RAM later if your needs change. 

And that is the key to the purchasing strategy I promised above: Look for systems which offer the ability to upgrade various components in the future. It’s usually not necessary to load up your system with every possible option and feature at the time of initial purchase. If you do your research and look for systems that have upgrade capabilities, you can use the system for a while and decide later which components to upgrade and expand as technology changes and (hopefully) becomes cheaper and more widely available. 

You might end up pleasantly surprised that having ‘only’ a 512GB SSD or ‘only’ 8GB of RAM is not the limitation you thought it would be, and you could end up saving hundreds of dollars that you really didn’t need to spend only to keep the inside of your PC case warm!

Our goal is to provide you with a great experience running a turnkey system which serves you well for years to come. Above all else, we aim to give you confidence to purchase a system that’s right for your needs without fear, uncertainty, or doubt. 

As Paul encouraged Timothy in 2 Timothy 1:7, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” We hope that this resource has helped your ‘sound mind’ to make a more informed decision, so please reach out and let us know if you have any questions about our computer bundles!