More RAM doesn't always amount to better performance

Hah, yes, Toms... That article is all right, but they were showing the differences between 6 and 12 gigs of ram... That's not what most people are at, most people are between 1 - 2, and should go to 3 - 4. But as I said before, if you want better gaming, get a better graphics card:) If you want to encode faster, get a faster CPU. If you want to run a media server in your house, get a gigabit router/switch and nic. If you want to join a fashion and spend more money on weaker computer buy a mac :)

I do find the four gig of ram runs things just fine I get a 7.1 base score for my memory everything else is slower 5.6 for the CPU and disk data transfer at 5.9.
Cannot for now buy a faster processor but a future option :)

The Conclusions drawn in the Toms Hardware article appears to say it all, and matches my experience. I recently upgraded to 4 gigs (from 2) and cant say i have noticed any difference in performance. Hopefully i will in the future.

(Excerpt) If 3 GB worked so well, why do we continue to recommend 4 GB to 6 GB triple-channel kits for performance systems? Perhaps we’re just a little too forward-looking, but we can certainly imagine scenarios a typical “power user” could encounter where 3 GB might not be enough, even if today’s tests didn’t reveal any of them

Conclusion - Review Tom's Hardware : Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM?

6GB doesn't hurt

4GB ram w/ x86 OS w/512mb gpu never caused me performance loss. In fact it does help. Now a 1GB or 2GB gpu that's a different story.
512mb gpu = 3325mb available system memory (for me anyway)
Plenty for what I need.

Shuko said:

6GB doesn't hurt

That's why I mocked Tom's article... They didn't use any memory intensive programs while testing. No photoshop, premier, vegas video, avid... You want to do an article on high memory amounts, do something that will use it...

Hi all

I never meant to say DON'T put more RAM in your machine -- all I
wanted to say is that the way most modern OS'es work (and that includes going back as far as the Venerable MVS/370 mainframe stuff from IBM) adding more memory per se won't necessarily buy you improvement.

My point was essentially to say that you might be better off upgrading Disks and Graphics BEFORE considering any upgrade.

Some applications may well load up totally into Virtual memory before starting - but with superfetch and other OS "tricks" this will only be noticed as a delay on starting the application and then probably not even if you only have 2GB RAM in your machine.

I've seen a 1GB notebook running X-64 build 7068 runnng the 64 bit version of Photoshop quite satisfactorily. -- OK you can't process 1000's of photos in Batch like you can on a machine with more RAM but it's adequate.

Remember in any case instructions have to be moved to the CPU decode area for execution and the CPU's are usually these days multi-processor AND multi-threading. The system will while the instruction is executing have already "selected" and "pre-fetched" the next set of instructions so the delay (especially from fast DISK) will be fairly small.

Large RAM is required for these sets of scenarious.

1) Multiple users concurrently using the Machine (such as Database Servers or even just corporate type servers running corporate applications with multiple users -- basic file and print servers excluded).

2) If you are running a LOT of applications at the same time (and I mean A LOT > 10).

3) You need to "Buffer" HUGE amounts of I/O -- for example backing up quickly several TB of data in the largest chunks possible -- but even here you are limited by the speed that the I/O device can read the data from the Buffers -- whilst one buffer is being read the other can be filled.

4) You need to run a whole slew of Virtual Machines at the same time --one application that does "Eat RAM for Breakfast".

It's NOT wrong to put 8GB of RAM in your machine for example but for typical users you won't actually see much advantage or performance gain -- but you most certainly would by swapping say typical "consumer grade" hard disks for expensive but very fast SCSI Raptors or similar.

Cheers
jimbo

I accept your apology... Nah, I'm just messing with you man, that's a much better explanation:)

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