Was not sure where to put this so I put it here. Thought it might answer someone's questions before having to ask. 
 
 
 
http://msdn.microsoft.com...emory_limits_windows_8

512gb for windows 8, that is crazy. Or is it? Ces 2014, Kingston showing 384gb running at 2133mhz. Wow! I am waiting for x99 to see what it can offer.
 
This might be a little off subject but I couldn't resist. 
http://www.pcper.com/news...-DDR4-and-gaming-seats
 

You know, this kind of has me scratching my head wondering where data storage is headed in the future. Ramdisk already has a version for windows 8 that will keep the data stored after reboot of the computer.  Data rate transfers between sata 3 and ddr4 are not even close. 

but bill gates said no one will ever need more than 640k, microsoft should stick to the dream, make windows 9 fit in 512k of ram 
 
but for further information
 
Windows 2000 4gb
Windows NT 4gb
Windows ME 1gb
Windows 98 1gb
Windows 95 512mb
Windows 3.1 256mb
Dos 5.0 16mb

DAVE2HOT4U
May I ask why you would ever need that much ram ? I know video editing takes a lot but I have 12 gb in a windows 7 oper. system and don't use much of it. I could see maybe servers using a lot but desktops ?    I have the 64 bit pro windows oper. system

If your applications have extremely bad memory leaks?
 
That's kind of a joke, but a colleague here at work often uses SolidWorks all day long and his memory usage by the end of the day is typically maxing out at his 8GB limit. Working with big assemblies, he has even seen that by noon on occasion. It's at the point where I will probably be upgrading him to 16GB of RAM soon.

DAVE2HOT4U
May I ask why you would ever need that much ram ? I know video editing takes a lot but I have 12 gb in a windows 7 oper. system and don't use much of it. I could see maybe servers using a lot but desktops ?    I have the 64 bit pro windows oper. system

Other than video editing and Photoshop especially if you working with 4K images like I am with my 4K monitor it's pretty easy to hit over 10GB easy.
Also, if you running any sort of virtual machines each one that you are running can eat use up as much RAM as you got!
for example running extra copy of win7, win8, win server each 4GB that's already 12GB not to mention you want to reserve some RAM for yourself!
 
Anyways, you'll hit your motherboard/cpu RAM limit way before you'll hit the Windows limit since most gamers don't use workstation mobo's that support lots of RAM
 
For example, the 4770K maxes out at only 32GB RAM
http://ark.intel.com/products/75123
 
that's why you'd want to go with the ivy bridge e processor like the 4930 instead that can handle twice as much RAM at 64GB
http://ark.intel.com/products/77780/Intel-Core-i7-4930K-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz?wapkw=4930k
 
 p.s. Also depends on the type of memory you using.

candle_86
i run 16gb so i can turn off the page file

LOL works great till you run out of RAM or try to play a game or run a program that won't run without a page file, which is pretty lame, but they are out there 

16GB should also reduce read/writes to the hard drive.
 
Any amount over 16GB is good if you do a lot of home animation, advanced photoshop, or CAD.