New 12 and 24GB RAM cards are finally here—why didn’t they arrive sooner?
New 12 and 24GB RAM cards are finally here—why didn’t they arrive sooner?
I've been using 24GB on my workstation for 12 years. It's a triple channel X58 LGA1366 setup. Recently, I upgraded to a dual channel system with 8 and 4 channels, which provided balanced performance.
Well Ryzen has always used DDR4 memory—now DDR5 is the update. The FX line before Ryzen ran on DDR3. 16GB became the norm right away with AM4 chips. Most systems got by with 16GB, but some titles needed a bit more. For instance, when I first played Star Citizen and Planetary Anihilation: Titans, both games suggested using 32GB kits. Star Citizen needed that because it wasn’t optimized and used around 20-22GB while running. Planetary Anihilation required up to 24GB for complex solar systems with many planets. Smaller setups worked fine on the usual 16GB. I was among the rare players who ran a 32GB system during the Ryzen 1000 era, mainly due to those demanding games. Other stories mentioned suggested 16GB was nearly sufficient, but as games evolved, needing more RAM became the norm.
Typical user interactions with Optane mainly involved 16,32GB M.2 units paired with Intel laptops and desktops from the 8th to 10th generation to replace slower 1TB HDDs. Over the past few years, I dealt with around a dozen of these drives that stopped working, leading to major performance drops even at basic usage levels. The issues were quickly resolved by using their RST software to detach Optane, though sometimes it wouldn’t unbind properly and the operating system suffered because the technology needed RAID mode enabled. This blocked cloning attempts, as Acronis prevented cloning from RAID volumes—even if they weren’t technically RAID volumes, Optane’s behavior mimicked that. Rebuilding the machine was often the only solution unless a backup existed and a restore was performed on a new drive. It was clear that running Optane in RAID mode undermined reliability for many consumer devices. I even witnessed this with an HP system that had a factory setup of a 512GB M.2 NVMe drive plus 32GB Optane, which behaved like a failing HDD in terms of application loading times. Detaching Optane quickly solved the problem. Enterprise versions seem stable, but the consumer side appears to be the weak point.