Gaming and Photoshop
Task Manager reveals that the system uses just over 2GB of system memory during gameplay. This is why there's no major difference in performance when using three different-capacity kits.
Indeed, opening up 15 tabs in the Google Chrome browser, concurrently playing four full-HD movie clips and having numerous other programs open - Photoshop, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Acrobat, Skype, et al - barely pushes total system usage past 4GB.
So what do you need to really, really push a PC of 2013? A custom Photoshop test fits the bill rather nicely.
The Photoshop Speed Test is purposely designed to make the most use out of bags of system memory and an SSD scratch disk. The test involves making a 7,000-by-5,000-pixel image, duplicating, adding numerous transformations, layers, blurs and fills. The sheer size puts an onus on holding lots of information in local memory.
There's a huge speed-up when swapping 8GB of DDR3 for 16GB - the time reduces by over 50 per cent - and there's a definite improvement when adding a further 16GB, to 32GB. The benchmark uses around 15GB of memory, if available, and that's why the 32GB numbers are so good.
For sure, this is a test purposely designed to showcase the benefits of huge amounts of system memory, though it can still be considered a quasi-real-world examination of a truly high-end system.