No Stupid Questions

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

• 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.

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! :]

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)

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.

Run a local LLM

Download DeepSeek's 64B model.

You could make /tmp a ramdisk which probably has some speed benefits.

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.

Qubes OS

Be in virtual machine heaven

I can take 'em off your hands. Three fiddy.

Open 1000 instances of vim

Run a LOT of VMs

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.

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

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

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.

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.