For most people the answer in 2026 is 16GB for a laptop or office PC and 32GB for a new gaming or creative desktop. Below is the reasoning by use case, and what each size costs right now on the 4,631 kits we track (from £1.07 per gigabyte; median £7.48/GB).
| Size | Enough for | Not enough for | Cheapest £/GB today |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8GB | Browsing, email, office documents, video, an older PC or laptop | Modern games, photo or video editing, many browser tabs plus a heavy app | see page |
| 16GB | Everyday laptops and desktops, most games, light photo editing, coding | Several current AAA games at recommended settings, 4K video, virtual machines | see page |
| 32GB | New gaming PCs, streaming while gaming, photo and 1080p/4K video editing, development with containers | Heavy 4K/8K timelines, multiple VMs, large datasets | see page |
| 64GB | Professional video, CAD, GIS, home-lab servers, data science on the CPU | Only the largest in-memory workloads | see page |
| 128GB | Workstations, in-memory databases, many VMs, 8K with effects | Nothing most people do | see page |
Windows 11 idles at 3 to 4GB before you open anything. A browser with twenty tabs is another 2 to 4GB; Teams, Slack, Spotify and a password manager add a gigabyte or two between them. On an 8GB machine that leaves almost nothing for the application you actually want to run, and Windows starts paging to the SSD, which is what the "everything is slow" feeling is. 16GB clears that comfortably. On a laptop, 16GB is also the point at which integrated graphics stop competing with the operating system for memory.
If you have an 8GB machine and it feels sluggish, adding memory is almost always the cheapest fix available: an 8GB module to pair with the one already fitted costs less than a game. See the laptop RAM page and the laptop upgrade guide for how to check that yours has a free slot.
Three things changed between about 2021 and 2026. Several big games now list 32GB as recommended and a few stutter on 16GB at high settings. People routinely run Discord, a browser and OBS alongside a game. And the price gap closed: a 2x16GB kit is usually cheaper per gigabyte than a 2x8GB kit, so 32GB costs less than double 16GB. For a machine you expect to keep for five years, the extra outlay is small and the headroom is used sooner than you expect.
Creative work sits in the same bracket. Photoshop with a dozen large files, Lightroom catalogues, DaVinci Resolve or Premiere at 1080p and 4K, and a development environment with a database and a couple of containers all live happily in 32GB. That is why the 32GB page is the busiest on the site.
64GB is the honest requirement for 4K timelines with effects and colour work, for anyone running several virtual machines at once, for large CAD and GIS models, and for home servers that host a dozen services. It is also the point where you should think about ECC memory, because the workloads that need 64GB tend to be ones where a silently flipped bit matters; see the server RAM page. 128GB is workstation territory and usually means a four-slot board or two 64GB DDR5 modules; the 128GB page covers how to get there and what boards allow it.
How much RAM a laptop needs is the same answer, but how much it can take is decided by the manufacturer. Many thin laptops since about 2019 have memory soldered to the board, so the amount you buy is the amount you have for the life of the machine; every Apple Silicon MacBook is like this. If you are buying a laptop rather than upgrading one, that argues for 16GB minimum and 32GB if you can stretch to it, because there will be no second chance. If you are upgrading, the laptop upgrade guide walks through checking slots, generation and speed.
Capacity first, speed second. Going from 16GB to 32GB solves problems that no memory speed can; going from DDR4-3200 to DDR4-3600 is a few percent in games and nothing in everyday use. Once you have the capacity right, the sensible speeds are DDR4-3200 CL16 for older boards and DDR5-6000 CL30 for current AMD (5600 to 6400 for Intel). The DDR4 vs DDR5 guide covers which your board takes and whether it matters.
Whatever size you settle on, buy it as a matched pair where the machine has two slots. Two modules run in dual channel, which is worth 10 to 20 percent in games and memory-bound tasks compared with a single stick of the same total, and on laptops with integrated graphics the difference is larger. A 2x8GB kit for 16GB and a 2x16GB kit for 32GB are the standard buys, and both appear on the capacity pages ranked by price per gigabyte so the best-value kit is at the top.
Memory prices moved a lot through 2026 (the price guide explains why), so the right move is to look at the live numbers rather than remember what RAM used to cost. Across everything we track the cheapest kit is £1.07 per gigabyte and the median is £7.48/GB. By generation the median today is DDR4 £6.70/GB, DDR5 £16.71/GB and DDR3 £3.52/GB (the price index tracks these monthly). Open the size page you need, sort by £/GB, and check the price history on the product page before buying; a "was" price on Amazon is often a 2026 peak rather than the normal price.