Windows 10 Home or Pro: from a RAM point of view

[alp]

I am hoping to build a PC this year after I finish off some of my debts and I was doing a bit of a research. I'd recently found out that Windows 10 Home x64 has a 128GB limit on RAMs it can handle whilst the Pro has a 2TB limit. 128GB is still a lot by today's standards but I am seeing PC gamers using 32 to 64 GB setups; already halfway through the limit. This sounds to me the OS (Home ed.) will be a bottleneck in about 2-3 years. I will not be building something monstrous just yet but I don't want the OS to get in the way of upgrading RAM in the future.

What do you think of having a 128 GB RAM limit? Will it be obsolete that soon or is it good for longer than I am worrying about?

 

[Sanji Himura]

There is nothing really to worry about for now. Those setups that use 32 to 64GB of RAM are just mainly there to protect resource heavy apps (outside of games) from eating up physical RAM. Realistically, you can get by with 16 GB of RAM and you will be okay for a while. Most people who do use that much ram have either multiple tabs open or they have resource intensive apps open.

That said, however, I would still recommend that you get Pro anyways because of Windows Updates. You don't get much of a choice for a home user to not update your OS every Tuesday compared to Pro users who can push it back until it becomes stable. I had to reinstall my OS four separate times (one of which is a hard disk failure) so if you have Home, we are basically the Gennie Pigs for their updates.

 

[Tornado]

Setups with that much RAM needed are almost exclusively for heavy productivity (4K video editing, 3D modeling, etc) use.16GB has been a good high end option for several years now (especially as memory speeds have increased a fair bit every couple CPU cycles), so if you don't want to pay the extra for Pro for the updates choice the 128GB RAM limit is quite a distance away from being a bottleneck.

 

[DQuaN]

Choosing Pro over Home shouldn't be about RAM requirements. As stated above, 128GB is more than you'll ever need, even 64GB is overkill.

Choosing Pro should come down to the other things it offers such as being able to join a domain, using Remote Desktop or Bitlocker drive encryption.

 

[alp]

Thanks guys for clearing the RAM size question I had in my mind but the non-RAM related features actually made me really consider the pro edition. After all Windows 10 is here to stay for awhile (at least that what they've said) so it might worth spending a few more bucks .

 

[Rallywagon]

To me, the biggest pro for going pro is the built in RDP.

 

[TenEightyOne]

What do you think of having a 128 GB RAM limit? Will it be obsolete that soon or is it good for longer than I am worrying about?

Unless you're doing a lot of heavy 3D modelling and rendering, sorting immense datasets or installing high-quality VR (GPU dependent too, of course), you're not going to feel that limit.

 

[BobK]

For what it's worth, some time ago I bought a new machine with 256 meg or 512 meg, I forget which, which was pretty much typical at the time. By the time I finally (semi) retired the machine some ten years later, I'd expanded the RAM to 4GB.