Forty Gigs Is Enough Gigs

8 gigs is not enough gigs. But 40 is. Last year, I wrote about my M1 MacBook Air running great with 8GB of RAM. But let’s get real. It’s 2025, and Apple’s raised its base specs to 16 gigs for new laptops, even the entry-level model. But since switching to a Windows laptop, now my RAM is at 40 GB, plus 4 GB for VRAM. Is that enough? Sure does seem like it.

Since RAM is actually not that expensive, and I wanted to have lots of headroom, and because my HP laptop let me easily open it up and add memory to it — unlike Apple devices — I popped in a stick of 32 GB RAM in the empty slot. Combined with the pre-installed 8 GB, it’s now breathing comfortably at 40 big ol’ gigs of plenty-fast RAM.

After using my new HP Victus for a few weeks, gaming here and there, the most RAM I’ve seen used at a time so far is only about 13 GB or roughly 33% of the total. So I’ve got plenty of overhead — nice.

Performance is fast and smooth — feels very responsive 99% of the time. I jump in and out of games via Steam at will, while an average of at least 100 processes are running in the background per the Windows Task Manager. If there’s a bottleneck in the system, it certainly isn’t the RAM. I’d say it’s not the SSD either.

The slowest part is likely the laptop-caliber 12th-gen core i5, which runs generally around 3 GHz at most, though it can turbo up a bit more. This is while it’s plugged in and the system is set at “Best Performance.”

As for GPU RAM, 4 GB is enough for most 1080p gaming at 30 to 60 FPS. I think the only place I’ve seen where a beefier graphics card with more VRAM would improve image quality is in No Man’s Sky. That said, American Truck Simulator, with its photo-real graphics of real-world locales looks superb.

Overall, I’m super-glad to no longer settle for not-enough-gigs. My laptop can go up to 64 GB, but unless I start rendering Unity files or exporting 4K videos, I don’t think I’ll need more than 40 GB for many years to come. That’s future-proof. Most likely, I’ll need to upgrade the CPU or GPU before the RAM.