Upgrading to 8Gb RAM

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Pretty much what I'll be doing in the next month or so (though with Patriot DDR2 800 - 5-5-5-12 - £187 per 4GB kit, though I've just had a look at the place where I'm buying it from and they've also got OCZ DDR2 800 with 5-5-5-15 for £176 per 4GB kit, and a little while down the way, say July 22nd-ish, a shiny Quad core's going in there).

While I do do alot of gaming I also do alot of Photoshop/painter stuff (high res/DPI) its primary use however will be by Vue 6 Infinite (via XP Pro 64) which sucks up as much RAM (and processor cores) as you can throw at it (Poser files coupled with sizeable texture maps for said files can hoover up RAM like nobodies business).
 
Well OP needs quantity and unless you're overclocking the difference between the DDR2 533 and DDR2 1066 is not that much. So for you to save up some $$$ OP, you need to get the cheap and reliable ones.
 
My god people, if the OP wants 8GB, let him have 8GB!!!

However,

1. I'm not aware of a 64Bit version of Photoshop, in which case it is limited to 2GiB, maybe 3GiB depending on how it is set up anyway.

2. While Windows XP x64 has plenty of address space, the Intel 975X and P965 chip sets only have 8GB of address space, as such you are likely to only see 7.25GB or so, just like an XP 32bit machine with 4GB.
 
Having a Mac vs PC debate is really quite senseless - the PC simply 'just works' without all the extra cost.

Mind you, if you are willing to pay for all the xgraded software and the Mac, then I might (only might) consider changing - otherwise pipe down Mac boy :wink:
 
Just make sure that you can return whatever memory you get, sans hassle. ...in the event it's not compatible with your MB or existing RAM.

Carol, you know your business better than I do, but I'm wondering if you may get more satisfaction, in the long run, with a quad core (if you've addressed that already, and I missed it, sorry...not enough coffee this AM).

Darkstar, this may be an unfounded inference and irrelevant, but I think 'him' may be a she.
 
If you want to know if you need more RAM there is a sure fire way. Lets all open up our taskmanagers (you know the thing that shows up when you Ctrl+Alt+Delete). Look at how much of your physical memory is taken, if it's all getting eaten up you can utilize more ram. If not then I agree with other posts it wont help. But at least this way you can be sure. A good test would be after you get more ram to do the same thing and see if photoshop is using into the 8GB.
One thing to keep in mind is that Photoshop has a "swap" file of its own that has a size limit, this might be where you are bottlenecking. I'm sorry but I don't remember the details on this but I can find out if you would like. But the good news is that you can change it to open it up for you.
 
Just make sure that you can return whatever memory you get, sans hassle. ...in the event it's not compatible with your MB or existing RAM.

Carol, you know your business better than I do, but I'm wondering if you may get more satisfaction, in the long run, with a quad core (if you've addressed that already, and I missed it, sorry...not enough coffee this AM).

Darkstar, this may be an unfounded inference and irrelevant, but I think 'him' may be a she.
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I don't 'think' so Halcyon - The max no of cores that Photoshop (or any of the other CS3 apps) can access is two, so I don't think going to 4 cores would be beneficial at this stage (maybe in another two years when CS4 will be due out) - but I tend to change my rig every two years anyway, so if PS does go 4 core aware, then maybe then would be the time to change.

Guys who are running PS with 8 or 16Gb of RAM have assured me there are considerable speed gains to be achieved by upping the RAM as have a couple of Photoshop engineers who I have 'spoken' to.

PS. I can also confirm that your last observation is correct. Unless I have interpreted the membership of this board's rules incorrectly, this board is not a 'men only' club. :roll:
 
Just make sure that you can return whatever memory you get, sans hassle. ...in the event it's not compatible with your MB or existing RAM.

Carol, you know your business better than I do, but I'm wondering if you may get more satisfaction, in the long run, with a quad core (if you've addressed that already, and I missed it, sorry...not enough coffee this AM).

Darkstar, this may be an unfounded inference and irrelevant, but I think 'him' may be a she.
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I don't 'think' so Halcyon - The max no of cores that Photoshop (or any of the other CS3 apps) can access is two, so I don't think going to 4 cores would be beneficial at this stage (maybe in another two years when CS4 will be due out) - but I tend to change my rig every two years anyway, so if PS does go 4 core aware, then maybe then would be the time to change.

Guys who are running PS with 8 or 16Gb of RAM have assured me there are considerable speed gains to be achieved by upping the RAM as have a couple of Photoshop engineers who I have 'spoken' to.

PS. I can also confirm that your last observation is correct. Unless I have interpreted the membership of this board's rules incorrectly, this board is not a 'men only' club. :roll:

I guess the male assumption came from the general populace here...

WAAAAAYYYYY too many male gaming geeks here who care only about their 3dMark scores and getting 200+ FPS in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

That's irrelevant in the business (non-gaming) world...
 
I guess the male assumption came from the general populace here...

WAAAAAYYYYY too many male gaming geeks here who care only about their 3dMark scores and getting 200+ FPS in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

That's irrelevant in the business (non-gaming) world...
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LOL - I assumed that was the case, but I wouldn't have dreamed of saying it :lol:
 
I think my first law of posting applies i.e. The number of idiots posting is generally greater than one. 😀

It strikes me that Carol knows far more about the subject than anyone who is answering. However, some of the advice is sound:

memory speed will make almost no difference to performance

make sure that you can return the memory if it doesn't work

If you are buying 512 or 1 gig sticks then cheap memory will generally be OK but you can't assume that at 2 gig.

Good luck with the upgrade
 
I think that the "gamer boys" not realizing that Carol is a she is that they spend so much time playing games that they have never had contact with a woman other than their mothers.
 
Hey carol, go with the cheaper modules as long as they will work in your system. I tried 4x2 gig mods on my system, was not stable at higher speeds. Am back at 4x1 gigs for most tasks, and swap to the 2 gig mods if needed.
As to the rest of the stuff thrown around (and to educate some of you), I am a "power user" of Adobe Production Studio CS2, 3dS Max 9 and Maya 8.5. Out of the three, CS2, especially After Effects will eat up memory like it is candy. While CS2 is not written for XP64, it will work, sort of. Some people have issues. XP 64 does not see my burners because of the layer loaded by CS. Means I do my projects in 64, then burn in 32.
In 64 CS will see and use the additional memory above 4 gig. Memory timings are not as important as cpu speed and memory speed. I find I get the best performance with my system (E6600) running at 420X8 and 1:1 on the memory, followed by 380x9 and 1:1.
It is easy to in CS to need even above 8 gig, create a 20 second animation with After Effects using a 1600x1200 Photo Shopped bitmapped animated object with a couple of layers and a particle generator explosion at the end, and watch your available Physical Memory drop to 0 and your swap file expand exponentially. Your system basically becomes a door stop for an hour or so.
 
Well ok here is what you need minimum to be able to use all of the 8gig that you want


Processor: Quad Extreme
OS : Win Xp/vista (64bit)
Graphic : Geforce 8800 GTX (SLI).
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Sorry pal but to be blunt, you talk some Bullshit!!

You don't need a quad core processor or 8800's in sli to take advantage of 8GB of memory. Any system benefits from more memory if running memory intensive applications and Vista especially benefits from 4GB even if not.

All he needs to install 8GB is the 64 bit version of Vista on any Vista compatible system.

Even a Pentium 4 will benefit if running a memory intensive application although the CPU may dictate the ultimate speed of the files processing.

As for it being a waste of money, it depends on what he's using it for. I've photoshopped a panorama and run out of memory with 2GB on XP and with the swap file set to max (I think I set something like 40GB!). In fact it refused to process it as even the swap file became too large to handle.

So if video encoding large video files or handling huge photoshop projects such as huge resolution, multi-layered pictures or panaormas then 8GB may be beneficial.
 
You are not likely to notice the difference in the slightly lower timings.

I suspect it would be noticable in a benchmark, but even if you lost 1% performance, would you really notice something going from 1min 40 seconds to 1 min 41 seconds?

And for all of those questioning why he needs more than 2gb of RAM.....

Some people actually do more on their PC than play games.
So any reference to 3DMarks, GPUs, etc... are all silly until you know what he is doing.

Myself and many people I know who use their PCs for serious work use loads of memory and lots of CPU power.
 
Go with the cheaper memory. You are getting more in order to keep more of what you are working on in memory, instead of doing I/O to the hard drive. The small difference in cpu performance(1-3%?) should not be noticeable. Do make certain that your motherboard can take the specific 8gb modules; some are limited on the type/size/voltage of memory that they support.
 
Hi guys,

The world of gaming and industry is 2 complete different thing. In the world of gaming, 2GB of RAMs may seems too much for us, however in the world of industry, 2GB is the real bare minimum amount of RAMs need for their PC to function. For example, i got a friend that work with some ADSL, catching sample data, he asked me similar questions carol_s was asking. At first i don't believe him like you guys did and said, but i went over to his workplace and had a look. When his program starts, everything was smooth, the Second he starts to capturing data with a click of a 'Start' button, in Real-Time (default), the PF Usage in Task Manager shoots to the max. The whole PC cant move unless you stop capturing. Thats 3GB of RAMs.

Then he upgraded to 8GB of RAMs, when he starts his program, no difference, when he click 'Start' , cool.. system is still working just find but the PF usage is around 3/4 of the max, sometimes to 5/6 if the internet activity is high..

So, carol_s, i suggest you buy if better timings if you need the max out of your PC, or if you wanna save money, get the lower timings, the most few seconds, less then 2 or 3? maybe. Thats difference between the 2 RAMs.


All the best and cheers,
Fat4l1ty.
 
im sorry carol but it wont make a diffrence... then you have to buy new processor and mainboard to
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Sorry but dripper doesn't know much obviosly. What a load of bull. I remember when I used to sell mac's to photo editors and ram was always needed. It is also needed to CGI as well like VUE for instance. One other suggestion you could try carol_s is put your swap file onto the ram. Some manufacters do make board that you put RAM on and the system picks it up as a HDD. This might help as well. Gigabyte do make one but there i better out.
 
For the OP (if she hasn't already quit reading in disgust):
Since you're likely pushing the design edge of your board with 4 DIMMs installed, be sure to run something like memtest86+ on your system after installing the RAM in order to do a thorough test of the RAM.
 
Driiper, can you please explain why she needs 2 8800gtx's to run 8gb of ram? Is there some limitation on motherboards that require those video cards for it to address a certain amount of ram? Or are you just one of those idiots that assumes everyone in the world uses their computer to game :roll: And if I recall correctly she never asked anything about if she needed 8gb, as I recall she already knew she needed it, and she just wanted to know what type to get.



Go for the ram with the slower timings, chances are you'll be able to tighten the timings a bit anyway, but run memtest to make sure it's 100% stable if you do.
 
You could try reading up on this article here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/31/tight_timings_vs_high_clock_frequencies/

What may be of particular interest (FTA):
There are very small real-life differences in performance between low clock frequency/fast timing Winbond memory and high clock frequency/relaxed timing Samsung memory. This is true in 3DMark01 and SuperPI even for CPU/memory intensive applications.

The bottom line is that as long as you have enough memory - preferably 2 GB - the extra money you pay for more memory speed would be better invested in a faster graphics card. And if you don't play games, then the CPU and hard drive offer more room for improvement than the memory.
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While it says 2GB, it is refering to gaming PCs. But maybe you should also consider upgrading to a new HD or putting some in RAID 0, hell maybe RAID 0+1 or 1+0 or 5.

Here's some info on RAID if you need it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

I run RAID 0 with a pair of 7200 Samsung drives I got fairly inexpensive. I do not notice a difference in game performance, but I do notice things such as texture loading and things similar to that. RAID 0 is a cheap alternative to things like the Raptor drives.

Anyway, a bit off topic there. I would suggest you follow JT001's advice.
 
Driiper, can you please explain why she needs 2 8800gtx's to run 8gb of ram? Is there some limitation on motherboards that require those video cards for it to address a certain amount of ram? Or are you just one of those idiots that assumes everyone in the world uses their computer to game :roll: And if I recall correctly she never asked anything about if she needed 8gb, as I recall she already knew she needed it, and she just wanted to know what type to get.



Go for the ram with the slower timings, chances are you'll be able to tighten the timings a bit anyway, but run memtest to make sure it's 100% stable if you do.
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I agree 100% with this
 
You could try reading up on this article here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/31/tight_timings_vs_high_clock_frequencies/

......... But maybe you should also consider upgrading to a new HD or putting some in RAID 0, hell maybe RAID 0+1 or 1+0 or 5.
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Thanks for that - but I'm already running a RAID0 array on two 150Gb Raptors which is where I have my OS (one partition), my program files (2nd partition), my PS scratch disk (3rd partition), my Page File (4th partition) and another partition for miscellaneous, non important files.

My data and images are on non striped Seagate Barracuda's
 
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