Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM?

[zodiacfml]

just came from reading about superfetch around the net then i disabled it...to my surprise, my vista computer became responsive as windows xp.
hey tom's, you should look into this.

 

[Guest]

If you really want to make use of greater amounts of memory you have to use a *real* operating system, like BSD, Linux, OSX, SolarisX86.....

 

[scdlin]

Running single application/benchmark, as this article has tried, would be mostly enough at this day and time except for a few memory-hungry ones, like Photoshop CS4 x64 trying to open 1500+ photos collected from a trip (the program simply begged that it couldn't open that many files, using about 5 GB of RAM). In my line of work/leisure, I routinely opened up 2 virtual machines (one Linux x64, one Windows 2000 for anything the host Vista x64 would have a problem with) and 3GB just won't cut it, even these machines only run at very light loads.

 

[bounty]

Anything less than 24Gigs is pointless. I like to watch 5 HD movies at the same time (all in several windows on my 19" monitor) while encoding 5 other HD movies. Throw in some AV scanning, I use 4 different programs to scan my system at the same time while doing everything else. There is also the 3 MMO's I'm playing, plus 5 different MP3's 1000 tabs/windows open, some in IE, Chrome whatever. Of course I have triple layered whole hard drive encryption going on. Several VM's are running, I'm compiling several large programs from source... and my 3d screensaver is on. Ohh, and every verion of 3dMark is running to stress test my system, so I can make sure it's running well. I'm not however running any IM programs because that takes up too much memory... I mean damn, who needs icq and IRC, that's just wasteful.

Now you may think I'm crazy from doing all of this at the same time, but since I'm on a single core Celeron, most of my tasks take a long time to finish, hence the need to run them concurrently.

(ohh, almost forgot, I'm opening 1500+ photos at the same time for some reason... I have compound spider eyes or something)

 

[superhighperf]

please do some more tests using ramdrive. i think the average user can benefit from this technology. especially if it can be used as a page file.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]superhighperf[/nom]please do some more tests using ramdrive. i think the average user can benefit from this technology. especially if it can be used as a page file.[/citation]

I can't g4et RAMDrive to work consistently under Vista x64. Works great for Vista x86, but memory limitations at 32-bit make that test useless.

 

[Guest]

There should have been testing on all of the 64 bit versions of MS operating systems.Vista is a slug no matter how much a computer you have.After testing Windows 7 64 bit I'm convinced that Vista should be put out to pasture.The limited scope of the testing in this article makes the information gathered USELESS!I have Windows 7 64 bit w/2 gigs ddr 800 on a G35 chpst board and an older C2D and I have sub-20 sec. boot time and all of my apps. open imediatly.No lag or waiting.The OS you use greatly influences how the memory you have is used and contributes greatly to the speed and efficiency of your system.So,If your system has trouble opening apps and suffers from slow boot times add more.If you have vista however I'd be looking at Windows 7 for a speed boost.The more you throw in vista the more it uses for a net gain of zero.

 

[itadakimasu]

I have 8gb just to satisfy the ol' epeen.

with the cost of ddr2, 4gb may as well be the bare minimum with any build. Depending on budget I may just put 2gb in if I were throwing together a really cheap build.

 

[Guest]

Adobe CS4 loves the extra ram. Video editing will eat up what ever you give it. I guess thats a reason to buy Vista 64. Adobe hasn't released a 64 version for Mac.

 

[antemon]

good to see this before I bought my new rig. And I was sorta annoyed that I couldn't get more than 4GB. YAY!

 

[atippey]

I have four Gigabytes on my 64-bit system right now (got a new HDD and wanted to make the 8GB upgrade easy when it gets cheap and neceassary), and when playing the last level of Crysis with Superfetch enabled, performance falls off a cliff after just thirty seconds to a minute of gameplay because IT STARTS CACHING CRYSIS TO THE HARD DRIVE, and even with a Velociraptor, frame-rates go from thirty-somethings to 0.3 (as can be expected with an order-of-magnitude performance hit). It did this repeatedly. I had to disable Superfetch and restart the system. I also turned down the settings, just for good measure. So, if I were putting the thing together today, I would definitely go for the 8GB because it's dirt cheap, and i seems at least one 64-bit game seems to need it. I'm guessing this will become more and more common.

BEGINNING OF DIGRESSION

Further, none of this factors in how many start-up processes a user may accumulate in a fully loaded machine (even though most gamers avoid this like the plague, but they will at least have anti-virus, possibly a DVR, or even a web cam or messenger suite). As with increasing any other resource, you can almost always find a useful or convenient way to eat up the slack. Also, who wants to close Office or Firefox or maybe even Adobe for that matter just to take thirty minutes off from homework to play a game. It makes it a whole lot easier to convince yourself it won't end up as three hours, which it more than occasionally does.

 

[scdlin]

To bounty: yeah I agreed with you that why don't we go back to MS-DOS 4.0 (non-multitasking version)? It was such a scandal that MS-DOS 5.0 ate up 100KB after boot. I was so happy that I could finally squeeze out 610KB available on DOS 6.22 after turning on A20, HMA, EMM, XMM. Damn you have a celeron that you wouldn't understand my pain.

Get over it. I don't like it, but there is a need for multitasking.

Regarding opening up 1500+ photos: that was for editing, not viewing. Now it seems a nobrainer to me to let Photoshop open up all files (if it can) than me dragging and dropping all the files one-by-one. I don't have carpel-tunnel-syndrome proof wrists.

 

[royalcrown]

[citation][nom]amdfangirl[/nom]I'm so guilty of having 12GB of DDR2 RAM...[/citation]

Congrats on finally upgrading to something modern...

 

[AngryClown]

[citation][nom]scdlin[/nom]Running single application/benchmark, as this article has tried, would be mostly enough at this day and time except for a few memory-hungry ones, like Photoshop CS4 x64 trying to open 1500+ photos collected from a trip (the program simply begged that it couldn't open that many files, using about 5 GB of RAM). In my line of work/leisure, I routinely opened up 2 virtual machines (one Linux x64, one Windows 2000 for anything the host Vista x64 would have a problem with) and 3GB just won't cut it, even these machines only run at very light loads.[/citation]
Photoshop won't open that many pics, regardless of RAM installed. It's a software limitation, not hardware.

 

[jwl3]

For years after I got my first PC, a 286, I thought getting more memory was tantamount to better performance in a linear way. I was sorely disappointed when benchmarks ran slightly worse (the original Pentium's cache could only covered 4 megs of ram and upgrading to 8 slowed it down instead of speeding it up). Now I finally realized that more memory beyond a certain point does nothing. But if you have too little memory, it will degrade performance severely.

 

[wuyanxu]

8GB user here, and running out fast: 3 VM (2 Folding, 1 work) + 2GB RAMdisk for user/appdata/temp + Visual studio and other crap.

it really depends on the user, a power user can fill 12GB without trying while a normal enthusastic will find 6GB perfect.

the benchmark numbers doesn't mean anything, (as the article said) gone are the days when there isn't enough memory for IE. i really wish they'd stop trying to benchmark memory amount, it's up to the end user to decide how much he/she needs, not meaningless numbers that are within error margin.

 

[Guest]

guys scanline is not memory hungry,try maxwell or vray or mentalray rendering and u wish u have 1TB of ram.

 

[Guest]

I just built an i7 920 system for a friend of mine with 12gb of ram. He's a developer and he runs all of his development environments in virtual machines. He works from home and finds it handy to run a vm to simulate each system which runs his application in production (web server, database, client, etc...) plus a development vm. 6gb of ram would probably perform about the same as 12gb for him right now. But it won't be long until it starts making some difference for him.

 

[Grims]

[citation][nom]trinix[/nom]I see a lot of heavy users and they forget, this not about heavy users. Yes if you run 20 programs, more memory will benefit you. If you have the money, more isn't bad. If you can use it, more isn't bad.But for the average user, 3 on a 32bit system is more than enough. There is no point in getting 16 gigs and only running 1 lesser game. Also there are examples of special games, yes, some games use more memory. They took an example of a few games and then said across the board games don't really benefit from more memory. If you are lucky/unlucky and your game can use more, yes. 2 mmo's, yes of course you use more memory. But for normal use, a bit of browsing, playing a few games not simultaneously, a few small other things, you don't require more than 3gigs. If you add photoshopping, add 3 or 4 heavy programs together, do the math. Yes indeed you want more memory.[/citation]

Then I guess my question is why are they writing articles for average users...when they don't read their site? The reason you see so many posts from heavy users is because....a hardware tech site is going to be HEAVY USERS. Obviously the heavy users already know the average user doesn't need 8GB of ram, but would be curious to see the scenarios that 8GB might help them.

 

[marraco]

It does not matter how much memory you give to windows, it ever uses the swap file, and the swap file access stops the computer.

A RAM disk with a swap file can noticeably reduce swapping.

Gad side of too much memory: Windows reads more data from disk, to fill that memory...

Good side of much memory: You can run virtual PCs with software you don't trust.

Good side of much memory: you can use software like BetWin to justify spending on one, powerful PC instead of two or tree slower ones. Useful for offices, and ciber-cafe.

 

[Guest]

bah love my 8gb of corsair 1066mhz memory play crysis 64bit and get 60fps normal game play on a 22inch at 1680x1050 with everything turn up except anti anliasing i think its worth it having more memory, so i can run as many programs as i like and leave it running in the background

 

[marraco]

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]I can't g4et RAMDrive to work consistently under Vista x64. Works great for Vista x86, but memory limitations at 32-bit make that test useless.[/citation]Please, contact the authors about it.

As Tomshardware, they will hear you. And it is a reason to buy a RAMDisk, so they should have interest in 64 bit support.

back in the days of W95/98, I did setup a compressed Ram disk, with swap file, and it speeded up a lot that crappy W95 (alt ought, memory was awful expensive then)

 

[Terminal58]

[citation][nom]ohim[/nom]Having more memory is about system response to load times and clealy multitasking, try to open Premiere , Photoshop and After Effects at the same time and do your work and you will see a huge impact into system response not just stupid 1 task gameing. Just 2 examples:http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/1300/30630315.jpghttp://img5.imageshack.us/img5/1691/40873236.jpgI guess this would run just fine on 3 GB too ?[/citation]
This is an obsolete reason considering that all new Adobe projects use the stream processors on NVIDIA cards (not RAM), ATI cards will start working in Windows 7 when DX11 comes in with work to allow apps to use the stream processors (DX10 cards are compatible with this).

You might say well I'm like this now but anyone reading this article now for there next build will find that misleading.

 

[tallguy1618]

If I have 4 2gig sticks (total of 8 gigs) in DDR2, my memory will still run in dual channel right?

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]tallguy1618[/nom]If I have 4 2gig sticks (total of 8 gigs) in DDR2, my memory will still run in dual channel right?[/citation]

If the board supports it and the modules match, it's supposed to.