Seems most people are going with 8GB builds. With memory being so cheap, is there really no advantage to getting 16GB?
More ram is always better, but consider the limitations of current games.
At this point, all games are pretty much still 32-bit.
A 32-bit game is limited to a maximum of 2GB of memory.
There is only one exception to this, and that is if the 32-bit game is Large Address Aware. Very very few games are Large Address Aware, but for the ones that are, the game will be able to use up to 3GB on a 32-bit system or up to 4GB on a 64-bit system.
So even with that one rare exception, we're still talking about the game only being able to address up to 4GB of memory under an absolute best case scenario (more likely, the program isn't large address aware and you'll be limited to 2GB).
So going from having double what any game could ever use under a best-case scenario to having 4-times what any game could ever use is going to give you no benefit whatsoever. At best, maybe Superfetch will cache some part of the game and it will load faster but that's it.
This might change once 64-bit gaming catches on, if that ever happens, but for now, anything above 4GB is basically useless for gaming.
On a final note, anyone who recommends disabling the pagefile is simply demonstrating their ignorance regarding how virtual memory works on a modern operating system. Disabling your pagefile is a terrible idea under any scenario.
Seems most people are going with 8GB builds. With memory being so cheap, is there really no advantage to getting 16GB?
You must be talking about 4x4GB because 2x8GB is still pretty rough on the wallet =T
How much memory is used by Windows 7 and other common applications running in the background when playing your game?
Well I'm sitting at 85 processes right now and using just over 1GB total memory between everything that is running. Over 1/3rd of that is just from Firefox alone and no other individual app is using more than 100 megs of RAM.
Oddball rare scenarios such as encoding while gaming aside, there is really no realistic scenario where anyone would be using gigs and gigs of ram in the background while gaming unless you were playing on a server or something.
I added 8GB for a total of 16, mainly because it's cheap. No real good reason. Was running 4.3 at 1.26v, had to lower multiplier to 4.2, got a blue screen. First one in the 6 or 7 months I've had this machine. Ran 8 hrs of memtest and 9 hrs of Prime blend, for the memory part, with no problems. No problems for the last month.I was thinking about getting another 8gb of ram because it's so cheap and partly because BF3's minimum requirement is 4gb of ram (in the alpha at least)
Does having more ram help at higher resolutions?
And does having all ram slots filled reduce overclocking with regards to Sandy Bridge?
On a final note, anyone who recommends disabling the pagefile is simply demonstrating their ignorance regarding how virtual memory works on a modern operating system. Disabling your pagefile is a terrible idea under any scenario.
systeminfo | find /i "install date"
Original Install Date: 27/10/2009, 05:29:28 pmIf you go with just 2x4, what slots should you put them in?
Please explain in what scenario you can force Windows to not swap out pages, except on RAM overflow. You won't be able to, because you simply do not have that level of control. If you want to absolutely prevent that scenario, the only way to do it right now is to install an amount of RAM greater than or equal to your peak commit, and then getting rid of the PF. The RAM needed to replace the PF for good VMM behavior is also extra cache, so it's not all going to waste.On a final note, anyone who recommends disabling the pagefile is simply demonstrating their ignorance regarding how virtual memory works on a modern operating system. Disabling your pagefile is a terrible idea under any scenario.
If you are like me at all- in that you fire up a game to play for 10 to 20 minutes at a time, while you have open the following:
8 firefox windows (each with at least 10 open tabs), steam, couple random folders, winamp(not necessarily playing music, but sometimes it will be),
sometimes a vm such as windows xp mode, as well as openoffice and or a few pdf files open in foxit reader, free download manager, and occasionally another thing or two, then 8gb can feel a little small.
So, 16gb in a case such as the one described (which is of course my case in real life) would not be overkill. In fact, I just ordered a new board and 16gb
of ddr3 1333
If all you do is game, sure. That you can do more stuff is one of the benefits of having a PC. My desktop is not merely a gaming box. I didn't get an NVidia card just for gaming, and I certainly don't have the serial port hooked up to game with*. A sizable browser session can take minutes to restart, and VMs won't always snap right back up, either. OTOH, left in RAM, they will take practically no human-scale time to get back to right you left them. Why close them? And, it's not like we can't get spare thread execution resources for them in the background, either.Running a VM and having so many firefox windows opened while gaming is just silly.. if you are loading up on RAM just so you can do things like this, I think you are just looking for reasons to utilize inordinate amounts of RAM.
Some programs can fail without a pagefile. I leave mine at 400MB small enough to not matter for disk space, but big enough for a kernel crash dump if required.
For my usage patterns, 8GB is plenty to sustain things this way.