Memory Upgrade: Is It Time To Add More RAM?

[K2N hater]

[citation][nom]Maaaaaaax[/nom]when using adobe after effects (as example) to render a clip, the program read the clip from the HDD frame by frame ( or frames as many as core your cpu have) so the hdd speed will be the bottleneck . if we try to put the clip in ram disk may this increase the rendering performance ?[/citation]
It depends. Will you copy the clip from HDD to the RAM disk first? If you do, the final result may actually take longer. On the other hand, using a RAM drive for files which as written/read frequently speeds up things much more than SSD at the cost of losing all the data if the system is shut down before it's copied to non-volatile storage.

There are registry tricks to reduce HDD/SSD usage/wear. Virtual Memory can be set to 0MB which may also lead to better system responsiveness. They have drawbacks so reading a bit about it and backing up your data before playing with Windows hidden settings is a good start.

 

[bl4c]

what would the performance be when 4GB is used and then compared with 16GB ...

sorry for the double post, but I mean also "compared with 8GB"

 

[cmartin011]

How about a SLI or crossfire test to see were the memory bottle neck with be there?

 

[dalta centauri]

8(2x4gb) for 150$ or less, it's already happening and to me that's a great deal. Bought myself 8gb of G.Skill that works along with my other 4gb. Using 12gb for under 250$ is something I never expected, but I can honestly say that hardware has become alot cheaper.

 

[gamerk316]

We know from previous benchmarks and articles that 32-bit games running in 64-bit environments don't benefit much (sometimes at all) from system memory sizes above 4 GB, at least not in terms of frames per second.

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Duh? The windows environment might be 64-bit, but the EXE is STILL a 32-bit compalation, so assuming PAE is off, you are still bound by the old X86 2GB Virtual Address Space limit. (Protip: Even on X64, enabling PAE will allow those 32bit apps to use 3GB of Virtual Address Space.)

Even then, extra RAM helps, because even though the APPLICATION is bound by the 2GB limit, there will still be less swapping from the HD involved, which is always a good thing.

And of course, as the data shows, beyond a certain point, more RAM doesn't help one iota, as you aren't significantly decreasing disk access or avoiding page faults.

 

[gamerk316]

After hours of computer use (gaming, codec rendering, watching HD content) my ram will be 0 free and 5500MB+ available (meaning the system is retaining old or garbage information), but I really don't care. It takes 5ms to dump the information and free up whatever necessary space for anything my CPU is sending over. I see no performance degradation or crashes at all regarding my memory doing the work it should be doing. Swap file still equals lose in my book.

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I'd be shocked if that indeed is the case; if you do anything memory intensive and need to grab data from the HD, you'd start to page fault like crazy. And heaven forbid if mutliple pages need to be loaded in RAM at the same time...(I still have nightmares about the OS/2 page fault bugs you could accidentally create...)

 

[-Fran-]

[citation][nom]pandemonium_ctp[/nom]Thanks for touching on the subject of the paging file. Though, I'm not sure I agree with the crashing instances. I would think that's due to having cheap ram or running your ram at latencies that it can't handle.I've had 8GB DC since my install of Windows 7 64 bit and disabling the page file was one of the first 'tweaks' I did. My primary HDD is a WD Velociraptor and I prefer to keep it running for a long time, so I like to keep HDD access to a minimum.After hours of computer use (gaming, codec rendering, watching HD content) my ram will be 0 free and 5500MB+ available (meaning the system is retaining old or garbage information), but I really don't care. It takes 5ms to dump the information and free up whatever necessary space for anything my CPU is sending over. I see no performance degradation or crashes at all regarding my memory doing the work it should be doing. Swap file still equals lose in my book.[/citation]

I'm backing this statement. I also disabled swap without using a RAM disk with my 8GB and zero problems so far. I'm using a Phenom II 965 @4Ghz with 2x4GB DDR3@210Mhz.

Cheers!

 

[DavC]

Nice article. was an interesting read, and i learnt a few bits.

in your tests, the swap file and ram disk - were they both on SSD and not the HDD? as there would be a much bigger benefit to the extra ram on a PC not running an SSD

 

[K2N hater]

I've used my home PC with page file set to 0MB for 11 years now. It crashes apps (and eventually lead to unresponsiveness from the system) ONLY when processes use up over 80% of installed RAM. The only app I've ever had trouble with was Adobe Photoshop, which requires a swap file to run.

 

[millerm84]

Great article, but I have a question seeing as how the 12GB Swap/Temp and 16GB Swap/Temp performed the same and both better then 8GB Swap, would 8GB Swap/Temp perform the same as the 12/16GB sets?

 

[nforce4max]

Try doing 16GB on a DDR2 machine, it isn't cheap $400-500 usd. So I only have 8GB 1066 kit instead paired with a SSD for paging and the file is 12GB in size. When I am doing my multi log runs in wow most of that gets used up and bandwidth yuck! I at the worst times will drop down to just over 1GB of free ram and my poor little SSD just can't keep up.

 

[nforce4max]

[citation][nom]bl4c[/nom]what about crossfire/SLI in games ?1x radeon 5800 = 1407MB "reserved from RAM"so would 2x radeon 5800 reserve a total of 2814MB from RAM ?this should be really interesting to see !what would the performance be when 4GB is used and then compared with 16GB ...now there seems to be an increase of just 1-4% in framerate (for 32-bit games)would it be possible that the advantage is much bigger for a crossfire/SLI configuration ?[/citation]

No it will still be 1.4gb as memory is mirrored for both crossfire and sli.

 

[nukemaster]

If 32 bit windows can "Only" handle 3.25 gigs of memory, then explain this?

Other then that the benchmarks are very interesting.

 

[marraco]

I would like to see comparisons to a good SSD (like an Intel, or Vertex 2, not a crappy Indilinx controller).

Also, I would like to see different memory speeds here. Probably 8Gb at 2000 are better than 12 Gb at 1066.

 

[cdbob]

With 8GB (2 x 4GB) kits hitting $100, 8GB really makes sense.

 

[bill gates is your daddy]

So riddle me this Batman....

In the given scenario of 16GB RAM, SSD as the OS drive and HDD as the data drive...

Would it be better to turn off the swap drive completely or leave it turned on and place it on the HDD drive?

 

[DjEaZy]

... ramdisk for the SWAP!!! or PAGEFILE!!! ... if YOU have 8Gb or more... take 4Gb of ram, put RAMDISK on it... and then put SWAPfile on the RAMDISK... at first load of an application you will not see a big difference in speed... but launch the app a second time... its blazing fast... it is good for thous, who rarely turn of the computer... the restart may be slow at times... but when in process... oh, man...

 

[DjEaZy]

... ou... i was so exited... but... it is in the article already...

 

[hythos]

When I first had installed 20MB of RAM on my 486DX2-66, I immediately set a 16MB RAMDisk, and copied Doom2 to it... It was AWESOME! Far smoother and faster load-times than on my friends' Pentium 60!! 1992.... good times.

I had bought 8GB DDR2-800mhz for ~$50/4GB back in 2008; Though thanks to the wonderful A-hat RAM brokers claiming Apple bought up all the RAM to rush product floods for Christmas 2008, that's why they said they raised the price to peak back at $125-150/4GB early this year. Same thing they claimed back in '94 AND in '98 (Memory-factory fire in China... BS).. total Aholes... yet another reason to say f the apple (and I say this with love! )

 

[hythos]

^^ LOL meant '94, not 1992

 

[thebigt42]

I feel sad memory I purchase last June for 175 per slot is now 75

 

[Guest]

I have a x58 System, with 6GB triple channel kit. One of the memory modules went bad, and as i couldn´t buy a single stick, i bought another triple channel kit identical to the first one.

Now i have 6GB again but also i have 2x2GB sticks that are unusued, would be ok to install them?(having 10GB RAM )

 

[accolite]

Pretty creative pic, ram memory on ram truck!

 

[Hupiscratch]

Nice pun with the RAM.

 

[Guest]

Hey, great article, but I have two things to say.
First, I've been running my PC with 8 GB of DDR2 and no swap file for more than two years now (after I read some article at tom's where they tested this configuration and said it was stable) and the only stability issues I've been having are when playing demanding games like SC2 in the summer, when my Radeon HD 4850's core temperature exceeds 105-110 C and the computer shuts down by itself.
Second, I'd like to ask something: how to make Windows and most programs (I'm not asking about my browsers!) save their temp files on a RAM disk (and not C? Because that would be the only use of a RAM disk, IMHO; I tried loading games (mostly Gothic 3 though ) from it and NOTHING improved, except for reducing the time for loading a save file from 45 to 35 seconds; the occasional stuttering (really annoying) didn't disappear at all.

P.S. I think I read the whole article, but I didn't see a direct comparison (in a 64-bit environment) of much RAM vs the same RAM, but part of it storing the swap. I guess it will be no use for me to actually turn on the swap file and put it on the RAM disk, but who knows?