I felt a bit flush recently and bought 4 x 4gb ddr2 stick to upgrade my main PC. Just run a few things and its obviously better than my previous 4GB total however I noticed, for example, divx conversion only used 56MB of memory and there is still so much free.
Is this much memory a waste? If so I'll use half of it to beef up my WHS.
Should I fresh install W7?
Proc: Intel Core 2 E8400
Mobo: Intel DG45ID (16GB max ram).
Yes it is a waste. Really anything over 4gb is a waste for an average user. For a high power user 6-8gb is optimal. Most apps do not need that much memory to run efficiently and with how efficient Operating Systems are with memory management these days, it is overkill to have more than needed. I know I like to have the fastest and the best too, but I would suggest, like you said, put half of it in your WHS although WHS only needs about 512Mb to run and 1-2Gb is optimal. Really it is totally up to you. If you want bragging rights leave the 16 in if not split it up. You could even put 4gb in WHS and 12 in your PC.
32 bit Windows applications usually can't have more than 2GB of RAM allocated to them. (Some can use up to 3GB.)
Unless you wish to run multiple memory-hungry 32 bit applications simultaneously, or you use 64 bit applications (like Adobe Photoshop CS4 or CS5) 16MB of RAM may not be useful.
Sorry should have said its 64 bit windows.
Even though the Divx app is only a 32 bit version it should still be using more than 56MB?
Most 32bit apps will only use up to 2GB of RAM.
The app itself needs to be coded to take advantage of a 64bit OS with Multi Core CPUs and large amounts of RAM. If not, all the extra simply does not help.
DIVX is a fairly simple encoder anyway, and really doesnt need much to do its job.
If not mistaken, it is more geared to mid-lower end hardware, and begginers. Then again, it also depends alot on the source & target file sizes as well as settings.
You may wish to look into some of the other x264 encoders, such as MeGUI or Handbrake if you want to make more use of your system for encoding.
I tend to agree, 4Gb is enough for the average user. Video encoding/Power users 6-8GB RAM is plenty.
My guess is the 16GB would be nice if you run multiple virtual machines or something along that line.
Perhaps some of the more heavy Photoshop work as well.
You may get some benefit if you run a front end that launches as many converters as you have cores. Something like FAVC 64 bit, as an example, would launch a copy of HC Enc for each core, and split the video so that each copy of the encoder works on a section of the input. Then it puts it all back together after. FAVC does DVD output, but there may be something similar for .divx or .avi output perhaps using xvid.
One place you can speed things up is the muxing demuxing end of it if you have multiple HDs. I put a USB 3.0 card in my quad core and try to set it up so that the drive in one USB 3.0 dock is the source, and a drive in the other USB 3.0 dock is the dest... with maybe temp file on the system internal drive.
You tend to get faster conversions when sizing up.. for example, converting .avi to dvd. Sizing down(720P input to 480P or high bit rate to lower) usually takes forever. For instance if you squeeze a 20 GB .mkv onto a DVD5. The encoders tend to be CPU hungry rather than memory intensive.
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