I got 32 additional GB of ram at a low, low cost from someone. What can I actually do with it?
Here’s what you can do with your impressive 64 GB of RAM:
Store approximately 8.1 quintillion (that’s 8,100,000,000,000,000) zeros! Yes, that’s right, an endless ocean of nothingness that will surely bring balance to the universe.
Unless something’s gone over my head here, this is off by around 6 orders of magnitude.
A long sequence of zeros compresses really well :)
The best thing about having a lot of RAM is that you can have a ton of apps open with a ton of windows without closing them or slowing down. I have an unreasonable number of browser windows and tabs open because that’s my equivalent to bookmarking something to come back and read it later. It’s similar to if you’re the type of person for whom stuff accumulates on flat surfaces cause you just set stuff down intending to deal with it later. My desk is similarly cluttered with books, bills, accessories, etc.
Yeah this is exactly me. Also a quick tip, if you’re on windows, there are some registry tweaks you can do to help prevent the GUI slowing down when lots of programs are open at once.
Run a local LLM
I used it for virtual machines and Docker containers.
I used to have a batch file to create a ram disk and mirror my Diablo3 install to it. The game took a bit longer to start up but map load times were significantly shorter.
I don’t know if any modern games would fit and have enough loads to really care…but you could
Open 10 extra tabs in chrome
LOL, maybe If I used Chrome.
An extra 20 Firefox tabs
Depends… If it’s DDR5 it might not work with the other stick… I was unable to add on another 64GB to my desktop a last year and had to eventually just buy a whole new 128GB set.
You could build another computer/server and self host things…
It’s DDR4, I’m too poor to upgrade right now. Doubt I’d benefit from it much anyway. I am thinking of building a server however. I have most of the parts minus a power supply.
You can install it in a compatible computer.
Which I did
Excellent!
thanks
Keep it and wait for the applications to bloat up. You won’t feel like you have an excessive amount of RAM in a few years.
You could run a Java program, but you’d quickly run out of ram.
Honestly, this is the answer and also the future of OS’s.
I have 16 GB of RAM and recently tried running local LLM models. Turns out my RAM is a bigger limiting factor than my GPU.
And, yeah, docker’s always taking up 3-4 GB.
Either you use your CPU and RAM, either your GPU and VRAM
Fair, I didn’t realize that. My GPU is a 1060 6 GB so I won’t be running any significant LLMs on it. This PC is pretty old at this point.
You could potentially run some smaller MoE models as they don’t take up too much memory while running. I’d suspect the deepseek r1 8B distill with some quantization would work well.
I tried out the 8B deepseek and found it pretty underwhelming - the responses were borderline unrelated to the prompts at times. The smallest I had any respectable output with was the 12B model - which I was able to run, at a somewhat usable speed even.
Ah, that’s probably fair, i haven’t run many of the smaller models yet.
You can run AI Models in it. Probably ones with 70b or up to 60b of you want to do other stuff while running them.
I built my PC recently and splurged to get about 100gb of ddr5, thinking it was going to be a waste of money.
I couldn’t have been more wrong, there are occasionally times when I’m almost running out of memory. How? Multiple desktops, each with tons of programs and stuff open, including probably like several hundred Firefox tabs open at the worst of times.
Basically, extra ram has allowed me to kinda postpone the responsibility of having the close programs, maintain cleanliness, etc. I still have to stay organised using desktops so I don’t go crazy with the number of things I have open, but I’m the limiting factor here, not my computer. And that’s a super liberating feeling.
TL;DR: you can NEVER have too much ram.
Does it have RGB? If not just bin it. It is worthless anyway.
