correct amount of ram need for a new computer build

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if you were to build a system today, what are high end systems using now?

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16gb is going to be the recommended on most big games nowadays, I wouldn't go over that, the GPU's of today come with a pretty good amount of built in memory.

The realist in me almost wants to say 8GB is really enough with the GPU memory these days... but I also know a lot of games are not optimised for PC, so that could possibly be bad advice

I'll check but I think I have 8 and have not had trouble

I would probably go 16gb for a build today.

Heck, my laptop has 16gb.

16GB with 8GB DIMMs will future-proof you if your motherboard supports 4 DIMMs in dual channel. My experience is the more expensive RAM is a gimmick. Order of importance IMO:

1) SSD
- High I/O in the 500MB/s range (Samsung Evo is a good bargain). Directly affects load time in games and texture buffering in games. Also the bleed-over performance in standard use (Windows boot time, etc) puts it above the video card.

2) Video Card
- RTX is still overpriced and the ray-tracing is not yet fully adopted in many games on the market (ray tracing is one of the most exciting developments in gaming in the last 10 years). Wait for the next iteration and see what games are on your radar that support it.

A GTX 1060 will perform well enough for a couple of years. Always the 1080 is a good card, but the cost is significantly higher and it may be harder to hold onto when games start advancing to the newer technology.

3) CPU
- You can fudge here a bit. Most games love to beat the shite out of your GPU first. You can get a good i5 and play comfortably, or splurge for a good i7 like the 8700K (previous gen but still fantastic). If you have to rob Peter to pay Paul, this is the place to do it (step back to an i5 in favor of a better GPU or SSD).

Side track,

what is a decent budget to set aside for a gaming PC? Kid wants one and the kid across the street will build it if we provide the parts? 800-1200?

this will be used as a fortnite and a few other games and probably a weekend item if his trend is the same as the xbone

but baw what if I wanna wireshark 10GB .pcaps and game at the same time?

I need 64GB!

So you think that it is more important to have a 1080 over say a 1070 than it is to have a good SSD over a spinning disk? It's an $80 decision to get an SSD, whereas it's a $200 decision for a 1080 and $400 decision for an RTX.

An SSD is almost a requirement for gaming these days. No matter how good your graphics card is, you are still rendering textures (that are getting larger and larger in every new release) from a local hard drive. If your super fast graphics card has to wait on your disk to serve the files into memory, then it's a moot point how fast your card is.

17GB

Rather M.2 imo. unless when you are saying SSD thats what you are inferring.

/***** I am not saying a gaming PC needs a M.2 drive lol *****/

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i have a system thats at least 10 years old with the I7-4970 @ 360 GHz, 512GB ssd with 512 ssd backup drive for extra storage and 16 GB ram but my weakness is a GTX660 2GB video card

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That's still a nice build outside of the gtx 660. A Second hand gtx 1060 for ~$100 would fit very nicely in your build