I am planning for a new build in 2 months,and someone else where suggested i get 24GB-32GB,because of what i will be doing on my system.
I will be doing gaming,but i also tend to have TON of tabs running(25-50 across 2 browsers),i also plan to start teach myself a lot of different types of content creation,like video/audio/photo editing,coding,3d modeling and other stuff like that,because i know i want a career in the tech industry,but i don't yet know what it is i want to do,so i plan to try as many as i can until i find which i want to do,then go to college for it.
Also i have bad ADHD,i have caught myself ALT-TABBING a game to look up something about the game,and 30 minutes go by and i have forgotten the game is still running lol,and i have also caught myself having 15-25 programs at one time,some of them were system monitoring programs.
I know with my current system with 8GB i run out of ram all the time.
Well if you plan on doing all of the stuff you mentioned, and money really isn't a huge obstacle you could go as high as you want although I would recommend staying below 64gb. Also hopefully you get a good cpu as if you have that many tabs open in chrome, you will use a lot of cpu resources. Back to the question, 32 would probably be enough, but if you could why not go to 64 then you would be good for a LONG time.
Well money is a small problem, I am trying to stay within a budget of $1800, I plan to get a 4790k,also with having 32gb in my build, I have a 240gb ssd, and a 2tb hdd, also if this helps I will have 2x 970's in sli.