These 2x4GB sticks are ridiculously low priced now that I'm tempted to get one. Currently on 2x2GB of DDR3 1333MHz RAM, I was wondering what more RAM will do.

Faster loading times?
Perfect coffee in the morning?
My laundry?

8GB seems to be reasonable at the moment, but what good will more than 8GB of RAM do? Say, 12 or 16GB?

Most boards are more stable with only two slots populated. That's why these 2x4Gb kits are so cheap and popular. You will not see any difference unless you are running low in memory now. I know a lot of people have all slots populated, so it's unnecessary to tell me are using all the slots. I'm just saying for OC only.

Agree with Speedbump.

I tried 16GB 1600 speed memory running at 1333 and found it to be no better than 8GB (actually one of the memory timings 1T went to a slower 2T -- not noticeable in practice). Also, I got occasional system hangs -- populating all 4 slots can lead to that with some memory and some motherboards. I gave 8GB away to a relative and kept 8GB.

Recently, building my Bulldozerless Bulldozer system, I needed 1866 speed. I decided to go with 16GB of 1866 (planning for the future). Running memory OC at 1600 (1333 is normal for Phenom II X6) the performance actually SLOWED DOWN in 3DMark 11 (not much, but noticeable). And, the system was occasionally unstable. There is a logical way that could happen. Running the 1866 at 1333 restored performance.

At least, with 1866 speed, I get 1T timings running at 1333. And, 16GB seems as fast as 8GB with no occasional hangs anymore.

All this to say, based on my experience, 16GB may run slower or the same as 8GB with less or the same stability. However, right now, 16GB does not seem to confer an advantage in anything I've tried. I assume that might change over the next couple years; so, I'll stick with 16GB for now -- but not recommend it to anyone else.

Ram is essentially your CPU's "work shop" when it comes to operations.

An analogy: The carpenter is the CPU, his workshop is the Ram, games are projects, and the storage shed is the hard drive.

Lets say our carpenter/CPU wants to make a desk:

The thing is, that desk will only take up so much space as a project, so if he currently has room for the desk project, a larger workshop won't speed things along any.

-BUT-

A larger work shop would allow the carpenter to have more projects going on at once. Where as his "4 GB" workshop might only have room for the desk project, one twice that size would have room for more projects to be laying around. The desk project won't need to be packed away into the shed (which takes time) if the carpenter want's to build a chair instead.

Put another way, when I bumped up to 8 GB from 4, I went from having to "batten down the hatches", ie exiting all non-essential programs when it came time to play a game, to being able to leave up firefox, MS sec essentials, etc. This applies to 32 bit programs of course. 64 bit, such as DCS warthog will stretch out a bit more on the work bench.

Im running 2x2GB 1333 + 2x4GB 1600 (12GB @ 1333) with a stable 4GHz overclock. I use ~6GB as a RAMDrive for some of my games and it definitely helps with load times and some other issues (stuttering when loading textures, LOD's, etc.). Windows doesn't really load/operate any faster; but programs are definitely more responsive if you have a bunch running at once.

Basically the only reason I bought the extra RAM was to run a RAMDrive until SSD prices drop some more, so if you don't plan to do the same then 8GB should be plenty

interesting.

How do you have the sticks arranged on the mobo?

Note the amount of RAM used as cache. The only thing better than a fast hard drive is not having to use the hard drive. Most of the programs that I use are cached. Some programs don't allow or support having their files cached, so I'll probably get an SSD to use as a cache drive.

4x4GB 1600 Corsair kit, 9-9-9-24-2T. No problem overclocking so far and I haven't increased VCCIO.

As has been said, the extra RAM helps when you want to set up a RAM drive or open many memory-intensive applications at the same time. No page file thrashing required; in fact, I turned mine off just to see what would happen and haven't had a problem so far.

Bottom line: If you need more, get more. If you don't need more, but don't mind spending the money on it, go for it. Don't expect major performance improvements.

Remind me again what a RAM drive is, what it does, and the benefits of one?

Otherwise, I'm guessing 8GB is more than enough for now.

Its a virtual drive that resides in a part of the RAM.

If you have a game on a RAMdrive, it should respond faster than an SSD.

I have the 2GB sticks in slots A1 and B1; and the 4GB sticks in A2-B2. All are running at 1333 and 9-9-9-20 timings (haven't tried to tighten them up as it's been plenty stable so far)