Having just found my laptop I use for rendering can take 16gb RAM (at the moment contains 8gb), and just going out to pick some up I was wondering what benefits I might see.

I have some eco heavy scenes that i bought that some time can take a while to catch up if i move the cameras about , is this just down to the graphics card?

does xtra memory have any beneficial effect on rendering ?

if nothing else is it likely to lessen the times it crashes or locks up?

thanks in advance for any one who can give me any information

From my limited experience, extra ram does help stability. 

But I only use my laptop (ASUS G73 i7) for initial scene building. Then I transfer the scene to my home built desktop for rendering, especially for animation. 

I'm saving my money to upgrade my desktop, but will probably only be able to afford
enough to cut render times at least in half.....not bad, but would be much happier if I could render in 1/10th the time.

If you can, I recommend getting a desktop for rendering with an 8 core processor,
at least 8gb ram, adequate power supply, and video card that e-on recommends, 
so it can render while you work on your laptop.

Laptops just can't perform as well as desktop PCs (don't know about MACs), especially when using VUE. I don't know if it's the program's code or just how complex the scene code is, but VUE definitely requires more horsepower to run well compared to any other 3D app I use, most of which run smoothly even on my old HP6226 laptop.  

It's worth the time savings. 

i used to use a desktop pc but it died though orginally built as a high end gaming machine it was good at rendering 2 ,but my laptop would render same scene maybe 75% faster .

unfortunately having a Thai wife who likes to visit her family couple of times a year (we live in England ) cant afford much else at the moment

Must be a pretty hefty laptop to beat a gaming PC. 

Nothing salvageable from the PC that died? Total meltdown? 

Good of you to let your wife go back home so often, though.  

mother board had gone so sold off salvagable bits , at least the laptop can come on holiday!

RAM allows for more content in your Vue scene.  That's it.  Less "Out of Memory" errors hopefully.

well ive installed 16gb RAM now not noticed much except available resources stay around 90% . Never had out of memory errors but have had resources drop to 8% once or twice , though the render still finished

Having tried it now with 16gb RAM an unexpected side effect is I can use my computer for other things while rendering which on 8gb was often impossible or very very slow