4 or 8gb
 

i realize the more memory the merrier your pc runs but is there a difference beyone 8gb in performance

If you're doing any type of rendering go with 8gb min. Some rendering programs even crash because there's a lack of memory. Also the price of 8GB is only about $40 and sometimes cheaper so I would just go with 2x4GB modules.

I find 8GB is or should slowly become the norm due to the price and the fact games are starting to become memory hogs when running.

8GB is about $10 more, so really why not, I use 12GB and have never seen it past 6GB usage unless I was testing.

especially with today memory hog browsers (chrome 1.5-2 gigs mem usage )

WHAT! I have used chrome since day one, and have never ever seen my RAM usage go up, only time I have had that happen was an older firefox version, kept using more and more RAm slowly until you rebooted, but that was years ago.

I've had my FF take upwards of 800-900mb lots of times