Wow confrontational. I guess I can only think of one project where I have really maxed out using 24 gigs and that was working with large number of objects in reactor - but breaking 12 gigs isn't that hard with a big mechanical sub-d scene open in max and zbrush open for detailing. In order to keep things running triple…
mannn what are you running to get the ram clocked at that? do you leave every program running or something? nice. lol I have 12, but haven't gotten close to hitting the max yet at a time. I did once, but that was a test and i opened pretty much everything i could think of to get it to 12. lol more ram is never a bad thing…
for a cool and silent pc i would use alot of heatpipe douchebaggery, (they seem more reliavle to me than watercooling, and at some degree of the previously named douchbaggery looks like steampunk) also 12 gb is good for intel cpus with tripple channel support. on amd i see no point for 12 gb since there are 4 ram slots…
12 GB of RAM is a great idea. That way, you can keep all programs in your workflow open during your entire art process without having to worry about RAM. Even if you don't need all 12 GB for all your programs, you can setup what is called a RAM disk and put paging files onto the left-over RAM to speed up undo and redo.…
personally I believe 2-3gigs is still kinda the standard for normal users, its hard to really use 12 gigs, 8/9 gigs should be more than enough for most people.
I have 12 at home and I love it. I would get more if I could. I can have everything open and loaded that I want to when working on stuff (UDK, Max, Mudbox, Photoshop, etc). It's nice to not have to think about memory limits.
the best thing you can do performance-wise if you have 12 gigs of ram is to turn off your pagefile completely, an SSD is also a great upgrade, i don't know if i need it, but i can write it off on my taxes, so i don't really give a shit.
i've got 12 gigs in my machine. to be honest i seem to run out of resources on my video card a long time before hitting a RAM bottleneck. so, having all those 3d apps open with scenes loaded and the system still responsive remains pretty much a pipe dream for me.