Going from 4gb to 12gb - is it worth it?

[Rubycon]

It really depends on YOUR individual usage patterns and needs, etc.

Some days I'm swimming in the page file with 24GB!

 

[SickBeast]

It really depends on YOUR individual usage patterns and needs, etc.

Some days I'm swimming in the page file with 24GB!

What do you have that computer doing? Is that 6 cores with hyperthreading or 12 discreet cores?

I know you could make full use of the 12gb easily in CAD or 3DS Max. 24gb though...wow! :thumbsup::thumbsup:

 

[Rubycon]

Dual X5680 w/HT OFF. 12GB per socket.
It's used for synthetic simulation and rendering, etc.

 

[SickBeast]

Dual X5680 w/HT OFF. 12GB per socket.
It's used for synthetic simulation and rendering, etc.

So with HT "on" you would have 24 "cores" listed in the task manager?

Why don't you use it?

 

[Rubycon]

Yes it shows 24 instead of 12 just as my W3520 shows 8 instead of 4, etc.
Two apps we use and we are told to turn it off. I disobeyed like I frequently do (it's not like baking a cake where it won't rise or any disaster like that) and yes things were slower then with it off.

 

[airdata]

Personally, I've never seen my own system going over 1.7GB; granted I don't do much. But really, you want it, so don't fight it...

I don't really max out my system at any time... but I know when I run black ops, it'll use 1.5-2gb.

 

[Kraelorn]

Well, if you you have few bucks to spare, then why not. Just don't buy cheap memory - it'll give you more problems and headaches, than benefit from low price. I've had four faulty DDR-3 2gb modules, and they were the first DDR-3 I bought. You even may not notice the problem untill you will start to test them with Memtest and LinX.

 

[SunnyD]

Funny, I made this exact upgrade. Except I got my 8gb for $57 shipped.

 

[pcslookout]

Hmmm I wonder how much longer until 16 GB becomes the standard.

 

[Continuity28]

Windows preloads often run executables in RAM if you got enough. It's called SuperFetch. Google it.

Windows does not use SuperFetch when using an SSD.

 

[Vette73]

There was a review recently and 4gig is the sweet spot UNLESS you do some types of encoding or other software that uses it.

With OCZ getting out of memory business it makes me think that memory prices will not skyrocket anytime soon. That and their seems to be much less differance between really good ($$$) ram and the basic stuff at the same speed unlike the early DDR2 and DDR1 days.

 

[ChrisAttebery]

I've got 6GB in my i7 system. With two users logged in and playing games such as Batman AA or Dirt2 I've never come close to using the page file. Usually I'm in the 2.5-3.0GB used range.

 

[SickBeast]

Funny, I made this exact upgrade. Except I got my 8gb for $57 shipped.

How do you find the performance?

Right off the bat I find my system more responsive, particularly after I exit a game. Opera loads up instantaneously now whereas before the hard drive would thrash for a bit.

I tried running Crysis off a ramdisk but it didn't seem to want to load. Even with 12gb of ram, I don't have enough memory to run most modern games off a ramdisk!

 

[SickBeast]

Windows does not use SuperFetch when using an SSD.

You can force it back on. They did that because the older SSDs had an issue with it. The newer and better SSDs still benefit from it so you should turn it on.

 

[GundamF91]

With my 8GB, I have yet to see a single modern game taking all of that memory, or even close to 8GB.

 

[Emulex]

no kidding i wish i did 144gb instead of 72gb on my dual X5670 box. you can cram unreal amounts of vm's on those cpu's and you'll run out of disk/network i/o before you run out of cpu.

folks using the 4-way (8 core) are doing 512GB to 1TB - sql server scales up not out so thank god they made us faster boxens

 

[Kraelorn]

With my 8GB, I have yet to see a single modern game taking all of that memory, or even close to 8GB.

I've yet to see a single modern game which will consume more than 1.4 gb on 32-bit XP. The OS itself on fresh boot use only 150 mb of ram (200 for 64-bit version). And how much Windows 7 and Vista consume on fresh boot? Riiight. Also much longer boot time. Superfetch is a joke. The only ram managing efficient system which is still supported by M$ are XP (32-bit and 64-bit).

How do you find the performance?

Right off the bat I find my system more responsive, particularly after I exit a game. Opera loads up instantaneously now whereas before the hard drive would thrash for a bit.

No difference with 4gb of ram and XP. Firefox opening right away after playing in Bad Company 2, Dragon Age or Mass Effect for hours. I have additional 4 gb of ram not installed - its just useless.
So thats mean - more ram is useless nowadays if you have enough brains to optimize your system and stick with XP, not modern bloated crappy OSes.

P.S.: Funny thing that those bloated OSes demanding more ram than most heavy games! This is not funny at all. Efficient OS is a smallest and fastest one, not those which eat all your available ram and asking for more.

 

[Rubycon]

P.S.: Funny thing that those bloated OSes demanding more ram than most heavy games! This is not funny at all. Efficient OS is a smallest and fastest one, not those which eat all your available ram and asking for more.

The reason why you see this is because the OS is optimized to use as much physical memory to increase performance the operator can realize and minimize the slowdowns caused by slow(er) mass storage devices. Booting to the desktop in XP 64 with 64GB RAM shows about 274MB in use! The same system booting into 7 shows about 3.2GB in use! Free memory is doing nothing to help you! If you boot 7 with just 512MB of ram it will use a heck of a lot less (and performance will suffer as well since the cache size for super fetch will be tiny to non existent!)

 

[Kraelorn]

For how long the system will boot to feed RAM with 3.2 Gb of data vs. 200 mb for 64-bit XP? Then how much drive accesses and cpu time will be spent to keep superfetch updated? Superfetch shortens HDD lifespan and eating more energy just for a small benefit of caching frequently used apps to ram. How much lower will be performance in heavy applications in Win7 vs XP, etc... It's highly unlikely that for example heavy Maya/3D Max/Cubase project or modern game cpu/gpu wise will be faster in Win7 than in XP. Yeah it probably will load faster at first launch (+OS boot time), but it should be slower overall.
BTW theres Superfetch analog for XP as well if you really need it, so there's no any reason to use Win7 or Vista, cept for DX10/11 games. The only advantage Win7 have is a newer DirectX versions, in everything other XP is the king of speed. I will never use an OS which is slower by even 2-3% than XP - in case of Win7 its ranging from -3% to -20% in different tests.

 

[Voo]

tabs open faster

Uh, considering that both Chrome and FF are 32bit processes (well you can compile a 64bit FF version but last time I checked it didn't work quite that well) that's pretty much impossible, since they can't use more than 4gb even if you've got TB of RAM available.

For gaming (still lots of 32bit exes around) and web browsing more than 4gb are pretty much useless. But since we've already got from that topic to "but if I run dozens of VMs or gigantic simulations I need the RAM" I think we're beyond hope.. but yeah the HPC server at the campus has 1.5tb of RAM and I'd still like more! (I think I've won that contest! Or do you need to actually own the server? Damn )


PS: How do you even figure out the exact amount of memory an OS needs? From adding together the system processes I know I end up at a pretty low amount..
And those "-30% speed difference" was shown in what tests? If I'd have to bet I'd say those tests were run in completely unrealistic scenarios (uh no I'm sure the number of PCs with 1gb RAM is growing every day - by that standard Win98 will also win against XP if we use a PC with 56mb ram)
Actually with the improved Win7 scheduler I can think of several situations where XP would've interesting problems (hi HT). Oh and from experience I can assure everyone that XPs networking is just horrible for fast gigabit connections if you don't hack the registry to use sensible values.

 

[Kraelorn]

And those "-30% speed difference" was shown in what tests?

Not 30%, I exagerrated a bit. But I had about 20% fps drop in few games in Win7 DX9 mode, comparing to XP, on this config:
Athlon II x4 640, 4 Gb of DDR-3 1333 mhz ram, video Radeon HD 5770 1Gb, sound Creative X-Fi Elite Pro, HDD Seagate Barracuda 1.5 Tb.

Here's also few more tests.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/windows_7_review?page=0,3

 

[Rubycon]

For how long the system will boot to feed RAM with 3.2 Gb of data vs. 200 mb for 64-bit XP? Then how much drive accesses and cpu time will be spent to keep superfetch updated? Superfetch shortens HDD lifespan and eating more energy just for a small benefit of caching frequently used apps to ram. How much lower will be performance in heavy applications in Win7 vs XP, etc... It's highly unlikely that for example heavy Maya/3D Max/Cubase project or modern game cpu/gpu wise will be faster in Win7 than in XP. Yeah it probably will load faster at first launch (+OS boot time), but it should be slower overall.
BTW theres Superfetch analog for XP as well if you really need it, so there's no any reason to use Win7 or Vista, cept for DX10/11 games. The only advantage Win7 have is a newer DirectX versions, in everything other XP is the king of speed. I will never use an OS which is slower by even 2-3% than XP - in case of Win7 its ranging from -3% to -20% in different tests.

:biggrin:

I've always had it off since I never saw much benefit in the first place. On a desktop system with slow IDE disks it does make sense. It makes no sense to run XP today. Our last XP64 machines have finally been updated to 7X64 once Siemens certified 7.

 

[Voo]

Not 30%, I exagerrated a bit. But I had about 20% fps drop in few games in Win7 DX9 mode, comparing to XP, on this config:
Athlon II x4 640, 4 Gb of DDR-3 1333 mhz ram, video Radeon HD 5770 1Gb, sound Creative X-Fi Elite Pro, HDD Seagate Barracuda 1.5 Tb.

Here's also few more tests.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/windows_7_review?page=0,3

Ok, so some benchmarks with up to 10% losses, which sounds more reasonable, but also some benchmarks where Win7 wins (and obviously the networking benchmarks). Considering those tests were done on pretty new GPU drivers chances are that there were some problem in those, especially considering that the problem appears only for Ati cards and even there the differences between Vista and 7 are way too large to be easily explained (it's pretty much the same kernel with some enhancements, why should we lose 10% performance for that? ). If we use the max(Vista, 7) values for the ati comparision it looks pretty reasonable - a few percentages here and there but all in all nothing tragic, although you do lose performance in some situations - but then the same was true for Win98 vs XP and you gain so many possibilites (the new UI libs make gpu acceleration much easier,..). For Nvidia the same is true, although even without the adaption the Win7 values don't look too bad (but again, you shouldn't lose 10% performance between vista and win7)


Also if we were to test that stuff with a modern Intel core with HT XP would lose some percentages because its scheduler has problems with virtual cores.

 

[Emulex]

6 dimms is optimal triple channel mode - 6 udimm's
8 dimms is optimal DOUBLE channel mode - 8 udimms

look at how poor performance drops when you add more dimms forcing into dual channel mode

 

[Emulex]

6 x 2GB = 9557
8 x 2GB = 6252

6252/9557 = .65 or inversely 1.5

That's alot MB/sec difference. (I have two cpu's).

The 3x4gb = 5742 (single cpu)
the 4x4gb = 4205

which is .7323 or inversely 1.365 - not as huge as dual CPU but still thats ALOT!