why not 8 GB ram?

[Zenobia]

With prices for RAM so good, is here any reason not to fill up a motherboard with at least 8 mb ram. Most motherboards can hold 16! Thanks!

 

[ch33zw1z]

Sounds like you're about to add some more RAM The only reason I can see is if the installed OS is still 32-bit. Then why bother, unless a RAM disk is planned.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I don't think I"ve ever went over 4g usage...

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: Zenobia
With prices for RAM so good, is here any reason not to fill up a motherboard with at least 8 mb ram. Most motherboards can hold 16! Thanks!

No. You will thank yourself later by going at least 8 GB!

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: Zenobia
With prices for RAM so good, is here any reason not to fill up a motherboard with at least 8 mb ram. Most motherboards can hold 16! Thanks!

Absolutely no reason not to. If I can say anything about the future, it is that you will eventually use that 8gb

 

[Eeqmcsq]

Originally posted by: Zenobia
With prices for RAM so good, is here any reason not to fill up a motherboard with at least 8 mb ram. Most motherboards can hold 16! Thanks!

The only reason is if you don't have a 64-bit OS. Otherwise, go for it.

 

[FastHosts]

Originally posted by: Zenobia
With prices for RAM so good, is here any reason not to fill up a motherboard with at least 8 mb ram. Most motherboards can hold 16! Thanks!

Yer mine holds 16 gb of ram iv installed 12 gb of ram no lag at all works better on vista 64 bit
desktop computer (make sure u get a good ram make)

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: Eeqmcsq

Originally posted by: Zenobia
With prices for RAM so good, is here any reason not to fill up a motherboard with at least 8 mb ram. Most motherboards can hold 16! Thanks!

The only reason is if you don't have a 64-bit OS. Otherwise, go for it.

Well if you plan on making a big ram drive then you should still be ok with a 32 bit OS but that is the only time. Still it would make no sense to not go with a 64 bit OS then because you have no idea how long you will want that big ram drive for.

 

[myocardia]

Both of my gaming computers have 8GB of RAM. I could get by with only 4Gb, of course, but for the price DDR2 sells for these days, there's really no point in limiting yourself.

 

[Emulex]

yeah the big thing with big iron and amd servers is they still use cheap ddr2-800 ECC ram versus the expensive FB-DIMM or RDIMM DDR3.

price is stupid cheap for DDR2-800 ECC compared to the other two i mentioned.

What alot of folks don't tell you is that when you fully populate out alot of motherboards with many dimm slots will clock down.

most nehalem will run UDIMM @ 1333; but move to RDIMM and throw more sticks in and boom down to 1066; fill it to the brim and that RDIMM steps down again to 800mhz.

i'm talking server but i'm sure some pc stuff behaves the same.

i have an ancient server 12GB of ram running windows 2003 32bit and sql server is eating up about 8gb of ram (AWE mode).

superspeed ramdisk plus can use ram in the 3.2 to 4gb range on 32bit for ramdisk helping tmp/ie8/ff caching.

 

[Zenobia]

For this motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-UD4P (Newegg #N82E16813128387) and either mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 (NE #N82E16820146731) or G.SKILL HK 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 (NE #N82E16820231219). And AMD Callisto (N82E16819103680) for $103!!.

Thanks for the replies!

 

[ilkhan]

I run 8GB. Works just fine.

 

[Gooberlx2]

8GB is great. I noticed a pretty good increase in response and overall feel when I went from 4GB to 8GB. Vista/Win7 pre/super/whatever-fetch definitely does a good job of management with all the extra memory.

 

[Narynan]

I got 8GB. Love it. Never have issues attached to memory. Itunes, EVGA Precision, Firefox, CoreTemp, Everest, Steam and Mass Effect, and all without any issues. Never going back to anything less than 8GB

 

[DukeN]

No reason not to if you have a 64 bit OS. I've had one rig with 8Gig for 3+ years now, and another with 2+ with absolutely no issues. Funny enough they are still running their first Windows OS installs with slight performance degradation over time.

 

[Adam8281]

I've been happily running 8GB for half a year. Before that it was 4GB. I haven't really noticed a difference, but I do like knowing that all of my slots are locked and loaded

 

[cify1964]

According to this article here it is a waste of money. I find the more ram I used the slower my pc performed. Just my two cents.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: cify1964
According to this article here it is a waste of money. I find the more ram I used the slower my pc performed. Just my two cents.

Something's wrong with your PC in that case.

 

[taltamir]

i regularly use more than 4GB of ram and i heartedly recommend it.

 

[daniel1113]

The only downside of more RAM is that hibernating and sleeping will likely take more time to enter and exit. Not a bad trade-off, though,

 

[taltamir]

not exit, only enter. It takes a fraction of a second to come out of sleep mode with my 8GB, but it does take longer to enter. Who cares though, I mean, I put it into SLEEP MODE meaning i am done with it for now...
Hibernate... hibernate only saves current data AFAIK, so that means that speed depends on how many things you have running... if you are using 2GB out of 4GB or 2GB out of 8GB it will take the same amount of time.

 

[faxon]

Originally posted by: taltamir
i regularly use more than 4GB of ram and i heartedly recommend it.

this. when playing fallout 3 i like having guides open in a browser on a second monitor or in the backround if someone is using my other computer with said monitor, i also keep task manager open since fallout 3 doesnt always play nice with windowing and crashes on me from time to time. once i have been playing for at least an hour, i have probably got 4-6 tabs open and i have visited a few hundred areas, and my memory usage goes over 4gb no problem. in everquest 2, when i still played it, all i had to do to use more than 4GB was go to my guild's hall and i would shoot toward 5GB inside a minute, once it loaded everything. this number gets even worse once i start dual boxing, since im literally doubling my ram utilization. and dont even get me started on when im doing my homework in multiple server VMs lmao

 

[Nizology]

If you're gonna go 8, you might as well double it up to 16.

 

[vol7ron]

Originally posted by: Zenobia
With prices for RAM so good, is here any reason not to fill up a motherboard with at least 8 mb ram. Most motherboards can hold 16! Thanks!

If I was building a computer, I'd want at least... 10 MB of ram. I Think you meant GB

Just because memory prices are low, doesn't mean you need all that ram. Applications free memory when closed and many times when idle. Unless you're running a database from your system, or maybe some photo/video editing software ... and you're using your computer all day, or at least, not shutting down; then you will not need that much ram.

Have your computer perform background diagnostics when doing intensive gaming, or whatever else you're currently doing. My guess is on a 32b system you never breach 1.5-2GB and on a Vista system you probably wouldn't break 3GB. -- I'm less accurate on Vista, since I don't use it anymore.

If you're running a server, then by all means, be greedy


vol7ron

 

[ilkhan]

Originally posted by: Nizology
If you're gonna go 8, you might as well double it up to 16.

acquiring/affording 16GB (4x4GB) is a lot harder than 8GB (4x2GB), mostly because many boards have 4 slots and 2GB modules are incredibly cheap.

As I said, I have 8 and regularly use 5GB. Encoding a 1080p h264 while playing demigod pushed it to 7.3GB/8GB used. :/ (and with a quad and slight priority change, didn't even slow the game down, although while recording at full 1920x1200 res with fraps it kind've choked...)