Memory Upgrade: Is It Time To Add More RAM?

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I guess my argument to this is. If you don't use the RAM by loading programs into RAM and it remains free. How does more RAM do anything? Seems to me that unless your bumping up against your RAM capacity it does not do much good to add more. While I think RAM speed and quality are more important.
 
Testing doesn't show the problems with limited or even optimal RAM of earlier systems but memory leaks or retention of RAM still occurs. Recently this was reported for browsers. Regular system shutdown and restart of apps minimizes the need but surplus RAM can help extend sessions. RAM should be like digital TV; either it works or doesn't. However, ECC memory exists (probably for I/O errors) and various degrees of pixelation occur at times. The multithreading referred to by peciura above is probably even more sensitive to leaks but matching of speeds seems important. I Don't know if it matters if XML data type is being used. If SSD drives still move files according to historical use, it would seem they are not best used for multipurpose computers.
 
I've learned this a year back or so. Thanks to Corsair (how much is just good enough) & Tom (DDR3 comparison etc). Guys who are wondering about upgrading should looking into this very informative study as well:

"8GB or More of System RAM—Doing More With More Memory"
http://blog.corsair.com/?p=65

BTW, I've carefully chose DDR3 1600 8GB (4 sticks) last year because of very demanding requirements such as Simulation, Modeling, Multiple applications on Multiple Monitors (with ATI Eyefinity) and most importantly Visualization (Win7/Linux) on most of the Workstations (14/21 I've built). Only 22nd machine, which is used by me, put through more rigorous Applications usage such as Number crunching and a few more.

Bottom line is that 8GB recommendation is very much justified if and only if you know what you want to do with it. Good luck :)
 
Hey I don't understand the "allocable memory" references in the article. It seems to say that if you have a lot of memory you can allocate more to the GPU for caching unused textures, thus preventing pop-in and artifacts. However, I can not find any settings the configure that would allow me to allocate more memory to the GPU. Is this setting automatically controlled, or manually configurable? Either way, can anyone help me find the screen they have screencapped that is in German? I just can't find it on my box and it's making me :pt1cable: crazy!
 
Take a moment to let the size of that heat sink on page 2 sink in. If someone had shown me that picture 10 years ago I would have insisted it was photoshopped.
 
THG DOESN'T GET IT!

Even in X64, 32-bit programs are still bound by the legacy X86 Windows 2GB Address Space. Adding RAM beyond what the system as a whole needs to run will do NOTHING to increase performance.

If you want to test RAM usage on X64, use programs compiled with 64-bit executables. Otherwise, the test is invalid due to incorrect assumptions.
 


The tests would seem to prove you wrong.
 
[citation][nom]Marcus52[/nom]I think it's important to emphasize that you aren't making the operating system address more RAM; you are turning the RAM on your mainboard into a hard drive.[/citation]

In a way you are. The OS is still responsible for creating mappings in the page table. The OS also needs to be running in PAE mode for the ram disk to address above 4G. The memory manager just doesn't use that memory for normal use for various reasons.
 
Two things concern me.. having those uneducated about how to do this correctly will lead to problems, possible data loss, etc. Second.. and bigger concern is Microsoft will consider some of these changes & optimized use of ALL system memory in ways that can be exploited as a security risk.. and/or a risk of sabotaging computers.. hard drive cache's were made to prevent data loss from happening.. turbo boost onto HIGH SPEED usb flash was supposed to do many of these same things (for less money than RAM-- $1 or $2 per GB vs $12 per DDR3 gb). Your analysis should have weighed this against more ram.
 
It's only a 1 or 2% improvement on most benchmarks. GO BUY NOW! I think not. Waste of cash. Hit 5% than call me.
 
I've recently added an extra 2GB of RAM to my system.
What is meant by the BIOS memory remapping function.
I haven't seen anything like that in the BIOS of my GA-MA770-UD3 rev. 2.0 board.
 
i am experiencing a lot of "glitching out" when playing the final battle scenes in Crisis. I have a hd5850, I7920, and 4 gigs of ram. The rest of the game was amazing but i cant continue to play the game on high with 8aa or i get an unplayable frame rate. i have to take almost everything to low and take aa off just so i can battle the last big bot. Everything looks like shit now lol. I am rally considering getting more ram after reading this article to see if i can keep those setting on high or at least to medium. it just goes against that commonly held notion that if you want get better graphics you get a better video card not more ram? but considering i already have a beefy card crossfire seams overkill. and if i learned anything in reading this article them maybe more ram is necessary to alleviate my problem, a bit anyway i mean Crisis is a demanding FPS game i don;t think more ram is the magic bullet.
 
[citation][nom]dacian_herbei[/nom]I think this article is great.I did not know you can create a RAM disk so easy.What I'm missing in the tests above and which would improve massively is the the compilation time of different programs.If all the intermediary files are in the ram disk the whole process should be extremely fast.what is also not measured is the improvement in boot time.This should improve a bit too.It would be great if you guys could add this tests.[/citation]

Yes, it does! I did some experiments with moving my TFS (Visual Studio 2010 source control system) repository for a 3000+ file solution containing 200+ projects to a RAM disk. Building the solution completed in about 25% of the time required when the same build was done from the 7200 RPM HDD, which was very nice. The even nicer fact was that doing "find in files" across the whole solution could return results in about 3 seconds, compared to the same search taking about 40 seconds on HDD.

I've started using an SSD for my source-code, which is awesome also, though not quite as dramatic. The nice thing about the SSD is that it requires less management (dealing with repopulating the RAM drive after reboots, etc).
 
One thing not mentioned is the perminent use of an external flash drive. Even though my mom's computer has 4 GB of RAM, I did see a noticeable difference in "performance" with an 8 GB flash in with a swap file on it. I bet it also fixes the problem with taking the swap file off of the HDD and having instability.
 
So More memory is good but what is better Faster/less Memory or slow/more memory?
 
[citation][nom]mariushm[/nom]On page 3 you're saying:Once and for all, the 32-bit (x86) versions of Windows XP, Vista, and 7 cannot handle more than 4 GB of RAM. PAE modes, registry hacks, and different boot options will definitely not produce the desired result. In fact, these have the potential to cause system instability and crashes. But then on page 4, you're saying:With one of these programs, you can use the memory that otherwise wouldn’t be addressable by a 32-bit operating system. Remember to enable the memory remapping function in your BIOS or nothing will happen.But this "memory remapping function" is exactly the PAE (Physical Adddress Extension) feature that you're saying on the previous page that it causes instability and unreliability.The software recommended wouldn't work without PAE enabled so you're basically contradicting yourself.There is absolutely no problem with 32bit versions of Windows working with more than 4GB - they're just artificially limited to this amount for maximum compatibility. In fact, there is Windows 2000 which can work with 32 GB of memory in 32 bit mode and Windows 2003 which is also artificially limited to 128 GB of memory. See msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspxAnd another problem in the article is the mention that 32bit applications can only access 2GB of memory - in fact with a flag in boot.ini the OS will allow apps to use up to 3GB of memory but apps (kind of) have to aware and compiled to support this, so I don't blame the author for keeping it simple.Regarding swap file, you recommend creating an 8GB ram disk. Problem is for maximum performance, Microsoft recommends a maximum swap file of maximum 4GB -1 byte, so that it can be memory mapped in the memory (and use 32bit file/memory pointers and so on). Setting a swap file higher than 4GB is not recommended and really not needed, as it will barely accessed when the system has more than 4GB installed.See support.microsoft.com/kb/889654 for more information.I also have a hunch that some of the problems in the benchmarks were not caused by lack of swap space but by the OS aggressively caching accessed files so when games touched maps and content the memory would get full by crap - this is very noticeable in Windows 2008 for example and can be tuned from the system settings.[/citation]

After reading your post it seems you either didn't understand a thing that was said or you didn't read it. That or you simply never figured out what a ram drive is. Been using them since the old DOS days. when you load a program into a ram drive its freaking amazing how fast stuff is. I have 16 gigs of ram in my system, Though i love ram drives i doubt ill be using one unless it helps a lot with BF3 😀 i hate load stutter while I'm in a gun fight !
 
They didn't. The shared amount is just a fixed sized based on how much installed memory you have. That memory can be used for graphics or normal use, but the chart doesn't say how much is actually used for graphics.
 
[citation][nom]sempifi99[/nom]Would be fun to see this revisited[/citation]

Agreed. There's still a lot of tests to do.
Just for example, comparisons between 1066, 1333 and 1600; along with 3/6gb and 4/8gb - which would mean different plataforms, most likely a lga1366/2011 and lga1155, maybe also a Am3+ with new AMD cpus for good measure.
 
I just built my comp with the same specs listed in the article; however, I can only run it with 1 RAM stick (2gb). PLease help. How do you set the bios to have 4 sticks running? Thank you very much
 
I just built my comp with almost similar to the specs listed in the article; however, I can only run it with 1 RAM stick (2gb). How do I set the bios to have 4 sticks running? Please help, I appreciate your kindness.
 
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