Memory Upgrade: Is It Time To Add More RAM?

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[citation][nom]doyletdude[/nom]Hmmm... i'm concerned because i use triple channel so i'm currently at 6gb, which is under recommendation however to upgrade to 12gb might be to much, especially since i've heard that using more RAM slots negativley affects overclocking stability.[/citation]

shouldn't if you have a good mobo (EVGA) and good RAM (g Skill)
 
Would be nice to see an article that covered linux and what happens as you increase memory too. When reviews hardly ever include linux this perpetuates people now wanting to try it.
I did have fun with a person who phoned up telling me there was a virus on my computer though. Kept him talking for over 15 minutes before pointing out that I use linux and whatever he was trying to con me with wouldn't be relevant.
 
This article was simply amazing. Not to say that the other ones were any less spectacular, but this raises the bar to a new high.

It feels as if it was only yesterday when I was telling people to go with 4GB of RAM as being sufficient. My laptop, which is not even a gaming model, is now constrained by only 4GB now that more and more memory-intensive applications are surfacing. Only if 4GB DDR2-SODIMM modules were within reasonable reach...
 
Great background piece, Igor, thanks.

I tried with the Gavotte free app. And it does actually work, the system is a little bit "snappier", and apps do open a wee bit faster.

There is however, in my case, a couple of downsides, which led me to uninstall and return to normal.

The one factor is trouble with hibernate. As I use the computer several times a day, hibernation is imperative to me. (Hibernation makes your pc faster in the first place, since the RAM never empties.)

But the second factor is, that installing a RAMDisc, makes my computer perform a cold boot in 75-80 seconds instead of normal 45 sec.

So all in all, I think it´s like most other "longhaired" ideas of how-to-get-a-superfast-pc-for-no-cost-and-no-downsides: Try it out, if it works for You, great, but that doesn´t mean it will work for others.

Still a nice background piece, though.
 
Quick question. If I had 12gb of RAM on a 64 bit system, and I create a 4gb RAM drive. Should I use all of that 4GB for swap file, all of that 4gb for temp files, or 3gb for swap and 1gb for temp?

What about making a 5gb ram drive (7gb left for system), then using 4gb for swap, and 1gb for temp.

This article shows nicely the benefit of a ram drive. But I'm not sure how to best use it in a 12gb system.
 
Where are the benchbarks with the swap file turned off?
All these fancy ram configurations seem to be about working around how to make the swap file fast. Swap files are old school and unnecessary, turn them off.
 
Where are the benchbarks with the swap file turned off?
All these fancy ram configurations seem to be about working around how to make the swap file fast. Swap files are old school and unnecessary, turn them off.
Click to expand...
As they said, in some cases the programs are designed to use the swapfile. Without it those programs react strange or just crash.
 
It's been literally more than a decade since I looked at RAM disks. How are they done these days? These seem to require apps - not a feature of Windows. Let's assume I have 16GB RAM. So I set up a swap file of 4GB and leave 2 - 4 GB for temp files (ought to be enough, right?). What's the best app for that?
 
So I'm considering one of two things. Get a very high speed SSD, or 16GB of RAM for my build. Considering some of the improvements mentioned in the article, what would you guys recommend? I do a lot of gaming, real minor encoding and photo work (use paint.net, not even photoshop), and run virtual PC for training/school purposes. 4GB right now definitely hurts with the virtual PCs, but 8GB should be enough. I would like to be able to run at least 4-6 VPCs at once though, and I'm not sure if 8GB would really be enough.
 
Going from 4GB to 8GB is a tough call for an average user.
A pretty small return on investment(ROI) for the price of the extra RAM.
If they're able, a CPU overclock, seem the best performance boost.
 
[citation][nom]hmp_goose[/nom]I, too, run an X58 chipset, with Win7-64, and don't know what this article is telling me . . .[/citation]

read it again. Even if you don't understand anything,the last page is pretty informative.BTW,this is a great article.
 
I am using wix xp 32 bit.I don't want to change my OS.My rigs ram is 2 gb.If I add 1/2 gb more ram then -
- Will it make the games run more smooth?
- If yes then how much ram should I add,1 gb or 2 gb?

Sorry I didn't understand the article fully that's why I have asked this questions.Plz anyone answer.I really want to know this.THNX in advance.
 
[citation][nom]abbadon_23[/nom]It would be nice if the those whole article was in one language, or at least translate the German graphics card tables to english.[/citation]
[citation][nom]arif69[/nom]I am using wix xp 32 bit.I don't want to change my OS.My rigs ram is 2 gb.If I add 1/2 gb more ram then -- Will it make the games run more smooth?- If yes then how much ram should I add,1 gb or 2 gb?Sorry I didn't understand the article fully that's why I have asked this questions.Plz anyone answer.I really want to know this.THNX in advance.[/citation]

If you are trying to run modern games/software, you'll want to add 2gb at the least. These days, 4gb should be considered the minimum for a decent machine. It should smooth out games for you some, but you should also look at your video card if you are getting choppy gameplay. There are some pretty powerful PCIe video cards available quite inexpensively now.
 
@gdsmithtx

Thank you so much :).I have 3 more questions -

- If I add 2 gb ram more and make 4gb then can windows xp 32 bit make full utilization of it I mean i heave heard that win xp 32 bit can only support ram upto 3.25 Gb
- "Interestingly, certain 32-bit programs in 32-bit environments with 4 GB of RAM installed will benefit more from going to 8 GB (or higher) than some 64-bit applications in 64-bit environments. As a side benefit, this approach closes the annoying gap between the 4 GB of installed RAM and the 3.25 GB usable by 32-bit Windows." Dose it saying that using 4gb ram is good for 32 bit OS?
- I don't want to install Win 7 64 bit because i think super-fetch makes problem in running game because every time it feeds all the memory which makes less available memory for the game.So superfetch isn't good.Am i right or wrong???

By the way my gfx card is serving me pretty well :).So right now i am only thinking of adding more ram though still a bit confused about using it in 32 bit OS,but if you answer the three questions given above then i will be clear about it.So plz answer :).THNX :).
 
I am using 4gigs of ram with win7 x64. Swap file disabled and no problems at all, much faster than w/ swap enabled. I still have about 2500mb free ram when not playing any game (just background programs like utorrent, thunderbird, hdd sentinel, antivirus, messenger and others and browsing with mozilla). Even when i start a game (for example NFS11) the worst case scenario is that i'm left with 500mb free ram and still alt+tab is almost instant.
So i don't understand the need for such whooping loads of ram when 4gb is just enough and it works perfect w/ swap disabled.
 
i use win 7 64bit edition.

i have 6gigs of ram

i never use 6gigs unless i am running virtual pc's

on average i range between 1.5 to 2.5gigs being used.

 
What a bunch of garbage. This article directly contradicts a previous article,"Do you really need more than 6Gb of Ram?" by Thomas Soderstrom, April 7, 2009, in this very same website. Asking for more reserves and resources for future use while we still haven't used the current capabilities optimally is just crazy, and wasteful. To further demonstrate my point; note, no power usage on these huge monster memory capacities. Nor, time to copy hard disk to RAM disk, and what you could've done with that time instead. I just upgraded from 3 Gb to 6 Gb and my I7 920 machine is worse off with occasional lockups and BSOD's. TH instead of asking you to buy more stuff should help you to use what you have more efficiently and intelligently, those are good articles.
 
catchercradle: I have ran my 32-bit Ubuntu 10.10 on systems with 1GB and 2GB of memory on a single core (2650e) laptop, and 2GB, 3GB, and 4GB with a dual core laptop (T4300). Going from 1GB to 2GB on the 2650e eMachines laptop made a difference on my butt dyno, and going from 2GB to 3GB was noticeably snappier on the T4300 Acer laptop I use everyday. But when I went from 3GB to 4GB I had to switch to a PAE kernel to even see beyond 3GB. I did not notice a speed difference there.

My next system (arriving maybe by Friday) is a refurbished Dell Inspiron 570 with a quad-core Athlon II 630 and it has 6GB of memory. I don't expect the memory to make this faster than my Acer, but the processor change and the HD4870 video card I'm putting in sure will. I originally ordered it from CedarPC with 4GB of RAM but that particular one was gone so they offered me a system with 6GB of RAM, same HD and CPU, and no wireless card for the same money ($280). Works for me, a wireless card won't cost me much more than $25 but adding memory sure would have cost more.
 
Just did simple experiment:
have 8GB RAM (1-4GB free, swap off), Athlon X4 620 and Samsung F3 1T (HD103SJ).
Dataram 3.5.130
510MB on RAM disk.
38813 XML files (total 93.4MB)
Used "Windows Grep" to search for a simple string in content.
It took 3min 25s on HDD and 2 min 19s on RAM disk.

The bottleneck was single core performance. If WinGrep were multithreaded app it had scaled almost linearly (e.g x3.5).

Tried speed up XML import to DB but without any luck.
Put MySQL "data" and "bin" dirs and XML files to ram disk, changed paths on my.ini. Task was finished in 30min on RAMDisk instead of 15min on HDD 🙁

Still like the idea to keep HDD idle as most of the time :)
 
Those interested in sleep and hibernation should take caution. My 64-bit system with 8 GB RAM and no use of flash drive (RAMboost confusion?) never has problems. Settings will have an affect long term, such as default HD idle of 20 minutes. With some very large files used by some, it is unlikely that default hard drive swap files will disappear. Apps that avoid this have overheard and maintenance issues. Thanks to TH, kevith, halfhuman and mariushm.
 
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