I thought the same as you @wes it’s got to be the relatively small extra expense to have 64gb and DCS proof my new toy for a good few years
Its the processor I’m not convinced on. Can’t decide if its a bit over kill as I only use it for dcs with the odd Arma or halo game chucked in occasionally
#iprobablycantaffordit
I am not sure if many games will work with more than 8 cores really. You can always do the new I7 which is the same core wise as the 9900K (8C/16T). The I7-10700K.
What’s overkill now will be “standard” down the road
Ouch!!! 
was thinking 32 to be overkill!
and it certainly is for everything except DCS…
i fly mainly multiplayer and most of my teammates are stuck at 16gb… will a heavy DCS map load on their pc? just have stutters or crashes…??
do you think is lack of optimisation or something else?
is FS2020 so memory hungry?
Other DCS maps may push system total RAM to 20GB (+- 2GB). If you exceed available, the system will use the pagefile to avoid out-of-memory. Pagefile (disk/SSD) is dozens of times slower than RAM, so you may find there is stuttering. Depends on where the pagefile is and how big it is, etc.
This is heavily dependent on graphics settings and the mission itself (number of units etc.)
Also how much VRAM your GPU has plays in as your system will use RAM as overflow for VRAM running out.
You can still get good performance on 16GB of RAM, but it you like to push the fidelity up and have busy missions you should go for 32GB at least.
If DCS is an occasional hobby, 32GB would be a waste of money as most other games won’t push the system anywhere near requiring it.
FS2020 I can’t comment on.
ty! Crystal Clear!
Pretty much every review I’ve read has said there is no need for the i9. Unless you’re doing some CPU-intensive build that normally takes hours and you run them all the time, the speed differential does not add up to that price difference. In most tasks it’s negligible, but the price isn’t!
Any thoughts on RAM clock speed and whether CL matters much @Wes?
3200MHz / CL16 / 1.35V seems to be the higher mid-range end of what’s being sold in NZ, except for some specialist overclocking online shops where they have lower latency and higher clock speed options at considerably higher prices.
Covered it here a bit:
You can find threads on the ED forums about it too, timings vs. quantity but quantity gets you far more per dollar as loading up on high clock speeds gets you 1-2% more FPS but a big hit to your wallet.
Then there is the whole base/XMP speeds I touch on in that post - depends if you like dealing with O/C or not and the stability issue that can bring.
Thanks for that and the other response too.
I had no idea that DCS could go anywhere near 32GB! Incredible that 64GB of RAM as requirement is now not in the too distant future. We truly run super computers at home these days.
Well, like I said there that was intentionally pushing it to see how high I could get it to go. Typical usage isn’t that high.
True, of course. I just read through your earlier RAM usage experiment thread. It’s good to understand where the peak is when abused, though - if your PC can take that, then normal use should be a cakewalk RAM-wise.
Yeah, luckily in the grand scheme of things RAM is one of the least expensive upgrades
And it CAN be upgraded, even in 3 years. Unlike a CPU, which will have a new pin or two every other year.
Super computers of old. Modern supercomputer RAM amounts are measured in 100s of TB. Titan, which was comissioned in 2012 and decommisioned in 2019, had over 600 TiB of RAM.
Summit, Titan’s successor has ~4600 compute nodes with 600 GB RAM each.
One thing I’ve never been able to do, upgrade a CPU without having to buy a new MB.
I find this to be less and less of an issue, since increases in CPU computing power aren’t that big anymore per generation. i bought my last CPU 9 years ago, the one before that I had for 6 years. Previously their lifespan was much shorter. At 9 years, my MB is so hopelessly outdated (PCIe2? i think, no m.2, DDR3 instead of DDR4, etc.) that there’s not other option anyway.