What is the best way to use 8GB of RAM in 64 bit?

bilzmale said:

Just moved to 64 bit and extended RAM to 8GB DDR2 800 MHz (it's what my mobo supports).

Currently I have set 4GB as a RAMdisk and moved paging file there. I have also set Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom 3 caches to the RAMdisk and Sony Temp files.

Main 'heavy lifters' are the Adobe progs and Sony Vegas studio HD Platinum. No gaming.

Typical usage: RAM 75% (50% as RAMdisk)
Paging 50% (set to 512MB max).

Am I on the right track?

Hi Bill and welcome


You do have some heavy hitters and the move to 64 is definitely a good idea. You are on the right track but I do wonder about you move to a ramdisk. You might actually be better off with a smaller paging file (and yes some H hitters do need some page file) and letting them run in ram directly.

The way to discern which would offer the best performance would be to have perfmon (or similar) check on the total page file accesses. Whichever uses the page file least is best.

Let me know if you need help in setting that up.


Ken