"What's the harm in having obscene amounts of memory, making my system effectively future proof?" Unless you need that much memory right **now**... No! It doesn't work that way. Your processor (and hence your motherboard, knowing how processor sockets change every or every other generation) would be long outdated by the time 24GB is not enough for your needs, by which time, DDR3 and 4GB RAM modules would be ancient technology. "Algorithms are for people who don't know how to buy RAM." And lots of RAM is for people who don't know how to write algorithms. :)