Sonar and Ram for most jobs

Hi
How far can you go with 12gig of ram truthfully before things crack up.
This Is the ceiling that I can go to with the motherboard I have got.
 
A lot of people I know have 16 and even 32 gig but I have always got away with 4gig of ram.
 
I would be happy to put a 12 track at most together and perhaps experimenting with a little home made movie track.
Just would like to know roughly.
I should have thought guys using 32 gig must be making 100,000 tracks!!!!!
 
 
All the best
John

John,
 
Don't get Gear Acquisition Syndrome, spend it on private training with someone instead.  Knowledge is better than nuts and bolts. 12 gigs will get you very, very far.

Yes I agree as from what you have told us of how your working 4 GIGs would probably even be enough. RAM is not going to be an issue for you. 
You can even test this by loading up your bigest project and look at the little meter. 
 

If you can do 16gb it's worth it. Anything above that is moving into more specific needs (e.g. a particular plugin that takes a lot of resources).

FWIW, I use 8GB here and haven't run into any memory related resource issues.  Granted, I don't use any of the really big sample libraries, but do use Kontakt and many synths.    And, my influences tend to gravitate towards many of the bands you've mentioned, so I'm with you there.  

Very True, bad assumption on my part.  As with anything that requires finesse the correct answer is often *it depends* :D

12 Gig will be fine. If you end up with 12 gig it's likely because you have the tri-channel ram and 16 wont be an option. Enjoy your retirement.

sounds like you're fine...Doc's suggestion is rubbish.
 
I got along for many years on 8 gigs... as I moved into huge sample based Kontakt instruments where I wanted lots of large samples to be loaded and stay "resident" or on line for immediate access, I increased ram as I upgraded my system not out of need necessarily but to future proof... 
 
Right now I'm using quite large orchestral templates and still am fine so haven't felt the need to add more ram.  Also, Kontakt has a fairly decent system for loading partial samples and streaming the rest so you should be fine for a long time.
 
Better spend available funds on things like SSD's, which are also way cheap at the moment.  These can be reused as you upgrade down the road.  Replacing your motherboard, cpu, and ram is no cheap adventure... Better to wait until you are slamming your cpu with some of the cpu hungry vsts out there...you'll know that before ram becomes an issue...
 
Enjoy!
 
BTW, I'd suggest adding your system specs and other aspects of your rig to you sig, as I and others have done... it will help down the road in responding to many of the future questions you might have without us having to ask those questions.

williamcopper
Sad to say I'm up to over 50 gigs now of my 64 .. already having to cut back to avoid crashes.  What ever you have you'll probably find a way to use. 

you're a special case, william... vegas and all your orchestral goodies'll do that... I'm gettin' ready to snag the Vegas Suite myself and assume an upgrade might be in order once I start creating climate vids over my songs... set for up to 64 but only using 32 at the moment... my piddly fanless graphics is gonna have to go first though, I'd imagine...