Page File necessary with 16 GB RAM?

I am going to be building a new computer with 16 GB of RAM with an SSD. Is a page file really going to be necessary?

If I take my current computer in perspective with all the stuff I have running this machine with 4 GB of RAM and roughly 11 GB pf page files (across a couple drives) is using only 6 GB of total memory. That is with 40 tabs open with chrome, outlook, 2 excel workbooks, google earth, and totaling 144 processes running currently.

One thought I had about disabling the page file with the SSD will help preserve the NAND cells with not having so many read/write operations, and improve performance (although some articles suggest this boost being not so much noticeable)

 

16GB RAM, booting from SS with fast HDD's? I'd set the SSD pagefile to a fixed size 200MB up to 1GB and keep a watching brief on it. Set a 4GB swapfile on a HDD, if you have one, if you don't and are planning on running solely from the SSD, set the SSD swapfile to 2GB+; many programs still expect, and are set to use, a significant chunk of swapfile space.

You can check your current swapfile usage from DXDiag.

I'm sure others will give differing starting points for swapfile settings but this is pretty new technology and only you can judge what's best for your system by keeping a close eye on what's happening as you work. The longer the machine's running, the more RAM/swapfile that's likely to be used as W7's (I assume this is what you'll install) memory recovery is still a little slow for my liking.

 

according to dxdiag page file (on this system) is using 6,128 (5.98 GB), which adding the RAM comes to just over 9 GB of total memory usage. Theoretically I could do without in this new computer with 16 GB, however if some applications expect to be able to use a page file then I may have to bite the bullet and use a minimal page file or use a page file on a different drive. Although I would assume having this amount of memory Windows 7 shouldn't use much of the page file..unless I have tons and tons and tons of stuff going on all at once...

Thanks for the info...and I will look around and see if there any big problems I might encounter say if I do just turn off the page file (obviously running out of memory would be one of them...if that ever happens with 16 GB LOL )

 

If you run out of RAM and you have no swapfile, the program requesting the memory will just sink without a trace - no error message, nothing

It's always a good idea to have a small swapfile configured on the System drive so you can catch minidumps in case of a BSOD; makes it a little easier to troubleshoot. If you don't set any swapfile, I think Windows will use create one as and when it's needed; I don't think that happens if a 3rd party program requests swapfile space though.