Windows 7: Memory Upgrade, No Visible Performance Boost

All,



I'm a video editor working on an HP Z400 workstation. I run an Intel Xeon 2.66 quad core with dual Sata hard drives (320 g and 1 TB). OS is Windows 7 Pro 64bit.

Ram was initially 4 gb (2 x 2) DDR3-1333 ECC, which I just upgraded, and leads me to my problem/question.

I bought 2 sticks of 4gb DDR3-1333 ram by Corsair and installed them. My system detected them fine and I'm now listed as running with 12gb of ram. I updated all my custom virtual memory/paging file setups, yet I'm seeing no performance boost! When I performed a test export, using simple standard def DV, the export time was identical to the old render time when I was running the minimum 4gb of ram. More unsettling, when I open a project in Adobe Encore, it actually takes LONGER to load the video. And all this isn't even high def. Just regular DVD res video, which you think would be screaming on my system. I'm concerned I made a mistake with my ram, or something is not set right. Any thoughts?
Your help would be most appreciated!

Best,

BR

Well video transcoding is insanely processor intesive, not particulary ram intensive. As long as you weren't running out of ram before then there would be no change at all. The time it takes to transcode the data is FAR slower than the spool times to/from storage so ram is not really needed for caching.

More cpu is about the only thing that will significantly improve video render/export times.

Video editing is about the last thing that anyone does on a standard PC today in which even the fastest machines available are simply far too slow.

My i7960 at 3.33 Ghz will just barely do realtime transcoding with all 4 cores and 8 HT cores blazing. (Actually it can vary from about 2x realtime to 1/2 realtime depending on output format being endcoded to)

Adding RAM to a machine does not automatically improve performance. Adding RAM will improve performance only if the set of apps you normally run cause the machine to be "starved" for RAM and cause the machine to start swapping memory to disk. If that situation did not exist prior to adding the new RAM then you won't see any performance improvement.

I see, this all makes a lot of sense. Clearly I just wasn't thinking about this in the right frame of mind. But it explains a lot, and I'm glad at least I didn't buy the wrong memory!

Thanks all!

BR