What can I actually do with 64 GB or RAM?

Open 10 extra tabs in chrome
- LOL, maybe If I used Chrome.
  
  An extra 20 Firefox tabs

You can install it in a compatible computer.
- Which I did
  
  Excellent!
  
  thanks

You could run a Java program, but you'd quickly run out of ram.

Sell it to somebody at a medium, medium cost who needs it

I used it for virtual machines and Docker containers.
- One docker container per VM just to maximise the ram usage.
  
  I realise that you are making a joke, but here's what I used it for:
  Debian VM as my main desktop
  Debian VN as my main Docker host
  Windows VM for a historical application
  Debian VM for signal processing
  Debian VM for a CNC
  At times only the first two or three were running. I had dozens of purpose built VM directories for clients, different hardware emulation, version testing, video conferencing, immutable testing, data analysis, etc.
  My hardware failed in June last year. I didn't lose any data, but the hardware has proven hard to replace. Mind you, it worked great for a decade, so, swings and roundabouts.
  I'm currently investigating, evaluating and costing running all of this in AWS. Whilst it's technically feasible, I'm not yet convinced of actual suitability.
  
  I unironically do this in proxmox. Keeps things nice and separate and i still have plenty ram left.

Compressed swap (zram)
Compiling large C++ programs with many threads
Virtual machines
Video encoding
Many Firefox tabs
Games

Keep (checks math) 3 more tabs open in chrome.

Run a fairly large LLM on your CPU so you can get the finest of questionable problem solving at a speed fast enough to be workable but slow enough to be highly annoying.
This has the added benefit of filling dozens of gigabytes of storage that you probably didn't know what to do with anyway.

I have 16 GB of RAM and recently tried running local LLM models. Turns out my RAM is a bigger limiting factor than my GPU.
And, yeah, docker's always taking up 3-4 GB.
- vram would help even more i think
- Either you use your CPU and RAM, either your GPU and VRAM
  
  Fair, I didn't realize that. My GPU is a 1060 6 GB so I won't be running any significant LLMs on it. This PC is pretty old at this point.

Here's what you can do with your impressive 64 GB of RAM:
Store approximately 8.1 quintillion (that's 8,100,000,000,000,000) zeros! Yes, that's right, an endless ocean of nothingness that will surely bring balance to the universe.
- Unless something's gone over my head here, this is off by around 6 orders of magnitude.
  
  A long sequence of zeros compresses really well :)

Fold At Home!
https://foldingathome.org/
You can essentially donate your processing power to various science projects that need it to compute protein folding simulations. I used to run it whenever I wasn't actively using my PC. This does cost electricity and increase rate of wear and tear on the device, as with any sustained high computational load. But it's cool! :]
- Does additional 32 GB of RAM actually help there? I'd assume this is mostly CPU-intensive work.
  
  looking into it, seems like you're actually right. looks like it runs best with a solid GPU. there may be other distributed computing projects better suited for abundant RAM.
- Thought this was obsolete as of like a year ago. Did they update it?
  
  seems like the last update was 23 Jan 2025

You could use it to finally level off that wobbly table in the kitchen.

700 Chrome tabs, a very bloated IDE, an Android emulator, a VM, another Android emulator, a bunch of node.js processes (and their accompanying chrome processes)

Run a local LLM

Download DeepSeek's 64B model.
- I actually did. I deleted it as soon as I realized it wouldn't tell me about the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
  
  But the local version is not supposed to be censored...? I've asked it questions about human rights in China and got a fully detailed answer, very critical of the government, something that I could not get on the web version. Are you sure you were running it locally?
  
  Oh, c'mon, I'm sure it told you all about how there's nothing to tell. Insisted on that, most likely.

You could make /tmp a ramdisk which probably has some speed benefits.
- With NVME speeds these days, that actually might slow you down.
  
  You might want to look at just how fast RAM is

Store your Firefox profile and all tabs in RAM for snappier browsing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM

The best thing about having a lot of RAM is that you can have a ton of apps open with a ton of windows without closing them or slowing down. I have an unreasonable number of browser windows and tabs open because that's my equivalent to bookmarking something to come back and read it later. It's similar to if you're the type of person for whom stuff accumulates on flat surfaces cause you just set stuff down intending to deal with it later. My desk is similarly cluttered with books, bills, accessories, etc.
- Yeah this is exactly me. Also a quick tip, if you're on windows, there are some registry tweaks you can do to help prevent the GUI slowing down when lots of programs are open at once.

If you are on Linux and I guess windows but nor sure. You already use it for cache. So you can never have enough ram. As long as it's the same speed of your existing ram or you will screw yourself in preformence.
- I'm on CachyOS. I made sure to enable DOCP and it's running at 3600mhz

Be in virtual machine heaven

Qubes OS
- Honestly, this is the answer and also the future of OS’s.

You never have to close a browser tab again. If a window is full just minimize it and start a new one!
- I hate having more than 5 open at a time. Apparently this is not normal.
  
  I do the same. Spare tabs are bad and drain data.
  
  Only 5?
  Or did you forget to type a zero or two?
  
  The way it was meant to be
- I just hit 230 on my phone.
  
  Mobile browser tabs are both too persistent in that they don't get cleaned up when you close the browser, and too amnesiac in that they can kill a connection if they are placed in background for even a couple of seconds.
  Its the worst of both worlds.
  
  I've opened infinity on my phone if Firefox is to be trusted.
  
  Sadly I have more on my phone than my work computer by a wide margin. I have 8 focus’s, each with something like 60 tabs. They’re basically bookmarks at this point. The phone does such a great job of killing those processes that it really doesn’t matter.

I can take 'em off your hands. Three fiddy.
- God damn Loch Ness Monster, get your own damn memory!

Open 1000 instances of vim

Run a LOT of VMs

Keep it and wait for the applications to bloat up. You won't feel like you have an excessive amount of RAM in a few years.

I used to have a batch file to create a ram disk and mirror my Diablo3 install to it. The game took a bit longer to start up but map load times were significantly shorter.
I don't know if any modern games would fit and have enough loads to really care..but you could

Photogrammetry (with Meshroom) or 3D scanning (point cloud alignments and processing has some beast requirements).
Meshroom would gladly use any resources it can find within a 20 mile radius.
- +1 For meshroom Used it with side hobbies. Was fun! 👍
- This looks promising. Do I have to be artistically gifted to use it?
  
  Not at all. It absolutely is horrendously complex at times, so be warned. However, it's an awesome learning project, if you like those kinds of things. (Paw through YouTube for photogrammetry projects as it's really neat stuff.)
  I "stole" a big fossilized rock specimen by taking a 4k video with my phone from all angles. Extracted a few thousand frames and rebuilt it. It doesn't look like much without the surface texture, but I was able to generate a reasonable 3D model. (Meshroom has also been the only app to thermal-throttle my 7950X3D.)

im sorry but you can't do anything with it i guess you're fucked

You can run AI Models in it. Probably ones with 70b or up to 60b of you want to do other stuff while running them.

I built my PC recently and splurged to get about 100gb of ddr5, thinking it was going to be a waste of money.
I couldn't have been more wrong, there are occasionally times when I'm almost running out of memory. How? Multiple desktops, each with tons of programs and stuff open, including probably like several hundred Firefox tabs open at the worst of times.
Basically, extra ram has allowed me to kinda postpone the responsibility of having the close programs, maintain cleanliness, etc. I still have to stay organised using desktops so I don't go crazy with the number of things I have open, but I'm the limiting factor here, not my computer. And that's a super liberating feeling.
TL;DR: you can NEVER have too much ram.

Does it have RGB? If not just bin it. It is worthless anyway.

Same thing you can do with half a hole. Fix it to keep your mind from wandering.

Run the Adobe suite, crackled of course.
- I avoid Adobe like the plague these days. Besides, they don't support my OS anyway.
  
  Pirated CS6 runs amazing using Wine. Or so I'm told.

Depends a lot. If you are going from 2 ram slots in use to 4 ram slots in use, usually the max clock speeds go down a lot. So the performance will decrease for just about everything you do, whilst the use case for such a setup is very limited.
I have a couple of extra ram sticks to get from 32 to 64gb when I need it. I bought them because I was debugging a rather memory intensive tool. Not only did the tool run in debug mode, which added a lot of overhead. The memory profiler needed to be able to make memory snapshots and analyze them. This just about doubled the memory requirement. So with 32GB I often ran out of memory.
However my Ryzen 5950X does not like 4 sticks of ram one bit. Timings need to be loosened, clocks need to be reduced and even then the system would get unstable every now and again for no reason. So I pulled out the 2 sticks going back to 32GB as soon as the debugging job was done. They are in a drawer in an anti static bag, should I need them. But for day to day 32GB with 2 sticks is a much better experience.
- And that was with the same RAM on all 4 sticks?
  
  Yes 4 identical sticks, same brand, same series, same type, same physical chips on the stick.

Depends.. If it's DDR5 it might not work with the other stick.. I was unable to add on another 64GB to my desktop a last year and had to eventually just buy a whole new 128GB set.
You could build another computer/server and self host things..
- It's DDR4, I'm too poor to upgrade right now. Doubt I'd benefit from it much anyway. I am thinking of building a server however. I have most of the parts minus a power supply.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

More than I could do on my Apple IIe at 64k.

Run Minecraft and YouTube twice over.
Figure once over is why I moved to 32, so twice over might need more.

I apparently used all 64GB of my RAM in a video game when using cheats and it crashed my computer lol

I have 64 and am about to upgrade to 128GB
I run windows in a VM. Nothing heavy, just to test some things on the shitty windows systems
I run multiple databases, MySQL, PostgreSQL, redis, MongoDB, memcached, all with extra memory available, for development
I run a large array of services directly and in docker containers. Transmission web, the ARR suite, jellyfin, next cloud, immich, onlyofffice, various PHP apps, the list goes on.
8GB is the bare minimum if you only browse 16GB Is the bare minimum if you also run other apps 32GB Is a good amount to work with 64GB is a requirement if you do development or have a lot of services 128GB is a normal amount for a developer