RAM Utilization

Fellow geeks,

I have what I would consider a pretty high-speed system. 12gb RAM, i7 920, 2x GTX 295s (3584mb video memory), etc... My question is, how do you get Windows 7 to utilize all of my RAM?
It is showing available in the Task Manager, BIOS, everywhere; but I have never seen it use more than 4gb even when playing games (Crysis, Call of Duty: World at War, +more) I have tried running Crysis and CoD at the same time, with Crysis in windowed mode behind CoD, but still it will not use more than 4gb and relies heavily (in my opinion) on the PageFile.

If anyone has any tips, tricks or other help I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
Eric

We're having a very similar discussion here:
possibly senseless upgrade, can I take advantage of it?

Personally I don't have more than 4GB of ram, in my own humble opinion anything more than 6GB is major overkill.

IggyAZ said:

silentrite said:

Fellow geeks,

I have what I would consider a pretty high-speed system. 12gb RAM, i7 920, 2x GTX 295s (3584mb video memory), etc... My question is, how do you get Windows 7 to utilize all of my RAM?
It is showing available in the Task Manager, BIOS, everywhere; but I have never seen it use more than 4gb even when playing games (Crysis, Call of Duty: World at War, +more) I have tried running Crysis and CoD at the same time, with Crysis in windowed mode behind CoD, but still it will not use more than 4gb and relies heavily (in my opinion) on the PageFile.

If anyone has any tips, tricks or other help I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
Eric

The only way you can use that much RAM is if you were doing video edition and rendering a large file to a DVD. At that point you should use the full potential of your MB, CPU and RAM.

This


12Gb for a gaming machine will not ever be used. At least , not any time soon.

The majority of games out now will never use more than 2GB for themselves.

So for a gaming machine 2Gb + system resources is typically all it will use.


I have 8Gb in my system and the only time I ever use more than 4GB is when editing/encoding HD video or virtual machines. Which for me, makes it worth having.

You'll have to find programs that need that much RAM. Try CAD or some matrix inversions.

whs you're basically telling him to throw in more money on something he already doesn't use, I think someone somewhere mentioned RamDisk...

12Gb of RAM will never be utilized in a desktop OS

I could fill 12 gigs of ram pretty easy using photoshop. A single highly edited 9x12 image can be almost a gig all by itself. Let alone doing something poster sized...

WIth 4 gig I get about 10 open raw files with very minor editing. 8 Gig would be mroe comfortable, but 12 better still.

Nemix77 said:

whs you're basically telling him to throw in more money on something he already doesn't use, I think someone somewhere mentioned RamDisk...

Well, other than with programs that are real RAM eaters his RAM usage will stay low because normally most programs just do not need that kind of RAM. And I did not say he should spend money - there are plenty of free programs around.
RamDisk is a nice thaught, but for what purpose? Just for data is probably a dull idea.