when I had my system with 4gb, I spent a lot of time waiting when dealing with my 24MP raw files. I've been using Lightroom CC for the past 2 years. Before that I was using Capture NX. upgrading to 8 helped, but I was stll doing lots of waiting... move a slider... wait a good 30 - 60 seconds for the slider change to take effect on the screeen... although my old system was a dual core machine. Don't think CaptureNX made use of the GPU, but lightroom does.


Just looking at mem usage now, and this google Chrome session is burning 1.4Gb of ram... and with nothing else running, memory usage is at 8gb. I guess with 32gb, the OS doesn't need to be aggressive freeing up memory...

Opening LR just now, LR burned 620mb before I've started looking at photos. As I start playing with photos, memory utilisation of LR jumped to 1.2gb... total mem utilised now 9,5 gb...

Whatever worked in the past, is long forgotten history... of course, using programs other than LR may have a smaller foot print... but 16gb would be the smallest I would recommend these days for photo editing.