Memory - Do we need more than 6 gig?

There was a question here - http://www.sevenforums.com/overclocking-case-mods/347-show-us-your-rig-192.html#post893231 as to whether 12gig of RAM was really needed? So as not to hijack the thread there I thought I’d post this article I recently found in my favorites here… Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM?

I’m of the opinion that we don’t need more than six at this point in time, you might even argue that 4 is still a sweet spot.

From what I’ve seen and read, it seems to me that nearly all games, and most applications are more CPU dependant than memory capacity. Well, that’s what the charts say.

I know as technology moves forward our systems will be pushed further, but are we there now?

Thoughts/opinions?

sygnus21 said:

There was a question here - http://www.sevenforums.com/overclocking-case-mods/347-show-us-your-rig-192.html#post893231 as to whether 12gig of RAM was really needed? So as not to hijack the thread there I thought I’d post this article I recently found in my favorites here… Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM?

I’m of the opinion that we don’t need more than six at this point in time, you might even argue that 4 is still a sweet spot.

From what I’ve seen and read, it seems to me that nearly all games, and most applications are more CPU dependant than memory capacity. Well, that’s what the charts say.

I know as technology moves forward our systems will be pushed further, but are we there now?

Thoughts/opinions?

Click to expand...

All I know is two is not enough for anything anymore (or at least what I use PCs for).

I hate page files and I can see times when yes 8GB of RAM would be useful (extreme multitasking maybe? with video editing high end gaming HD video streaming all happening at once), but practical uses not really.

4GB will do me for the time being but in the next 3-4 years I'm pretty sure I'll be going for 8GB .

Oli

Although RAM can be an important factor for certain applications, I think that the average user is still well served with 4GBs (even 3GBs for a 32bit OS). I have both (4GB for 64bit and 3GB for 32bit) and I hardly ever notice a page fault. That leads me to believe that there is enough RAM for what I am doing (which is bread and butter stuff). Even during heavy video editing which keeps all my 4 cores running at about 75%, there are no page faults.

Yeah I haven't seen a page fault since my early days in XP when I barely had 1gig of RAM.

Very large Cad models and things alike are the only thing i know of that will eat up more then 6 gigs of ram at this point. No video game even requires 4 yet. FFXIV i believe is recommending 4 but thats the highest iv seen yet for a game.

This is but one of a few game charts from Tom's test but as you can see, there's virtually no change in performance between 3 and 12gig of memory.

I have 8GB of RAM in my home machine and my work desktop. The sole reason is that I run a lot of virtual machines being a sys admin for a living and I like the ability to set things up and test. I often will fire up 2-3 VM's each with 2GB of RAM dedicated to them. Thus, I use the RAM from time to time. But when I am not running VM's...nothing is eating up my RAM.

Editing raws in photoshop will eat as much ram as you have...

Loading 2 virtual machines and having 4 copies of msvc running will eat up 8 gig easily.

I hit the 8+ gig mark in usage quite a bit, the rest is cached data/files that would otherwise need to be paged to disk or reloaded next time I needed them, so overall the rest of the machine reponds faster to loading new programs with all that already in memory.

For all my work 4 was never ever enough, 8 would be ok, 12 is really sweet

Can you find a way to eat up 8 gigs of ram, yes you can. Take a notice of what people are doing to eat up 8 or even 4 gigs of ram. If this is what you plan to do stick the ram in there. If you are like most 4 gigs 64 bit and 3 gigs 32 bit. This is not gospel but it is a good rule of the thumb. One must decide what they want the computer to do and how well. If you had a bunch of VM, CAD, Photo you would not be asking this question. Keep in mind more ram never hurts but some times it doesn't help. If you do things like fseal posted stick as much ram as your system will allow.

As a photographer I use photoshop all the time and I still can't see a need for more than 6gig of RAM. And I usually listen to iTunes while I'm working in photoshop.

Unless you are working with huge (500+meg) files or doing some heavy intensive stuff like layering which can make those files even larger, I still say 6gig is enough for most tasks in photoshop.

Additionally, in Windows Vista 64-bit, processing very large images is much faster if your computer has large amounts of RAM (6-8 GB).

Click to expand...

Optimize Photoshop performance | CS3 | XP, Vista

sygnus21 said:

As a photographer I use photoshop all the time and I still can't see a need for more than 6gig of RAM. And I usually listen to iTunes while I'm working in photoshop.

Unless you are working with huge (500+meg) files or doing some heavy intensive stuff like layering which can make those files even larger, I still say 6gig is enough for most tasks in photoshop.

Additionally, in Windows Vista 64-bit, processing very large images is much faster if your computer has large amounts of RAM (6-8 GB).

Click to expand...

Optimize Photoshop performance | CS3 | XP, Vista

Click to expand...

beeing the one who started the discussion (with plans to put 12 gb ram in my new rig) i still havent decided what to buy.

the 12 GB Corsair Dominator GT (1866Mhz) still sounds great, but someone told me (i think it was Sygnus) that this speeds are not reached by the MoBO, and therefor not neccesary. and with a cache of 8-8-8 it`s not neccesary better/faster than 6GB RAM with a cache of 7-7-7.

i`m using programs like Qbase, FL studio etc. with a lot of heavy plugins that use al lot of CPU and RAM, and of course live music recording (multiple tracks at a time, and all the above at the same time).

this is why my original idea was to put in 12GB, to never reach the limit of my rig`s RAM... (for comparison, i`m now working with 4 GB om 800Mhz, and that`s just not enough)

now my 2 questions are:

do i need the 12GB?

is the 6GB at 7-7-7 faster, and therefor the better choice?

i have 3gb for 64 bit and have never had a ram problem, however i don't have a powerful processor and so extreme multi tasking isn't possible anyway. The game that uses most ram for me that i can run smoothly is gothic three that uses just over a gig. Including windows 7 usage that leave 1 gig free, more than enogh for me

the 12 GB Corsair Dominator GT (1866Mhz) still sounds great, but someone told me (i think it was Sygnus) that this speeds are not reached by the MoBO, and therefor not neccesary. and with a cache of 8-8-8 it`s not neccesary better/faster than 6GB RAM with a cache of 7-7-7.

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It is true that your memory buss will never reach 1866 It'll be running at 1333 probably so there is no reason to splurge on memory that fast. If 1600 memory is 2/3 the price then that's what to get.

Also the speed of the memory has virtually ZERO effect on the speed of the computer. In a game with 250 fps you might lose 1-2 fps between the 888 and 777 memory speeds. Not hitting swap by never running out of memory no matter what you throw at your machine will have a tremendous impact.

If money is tight then 6 is probably just fine. But I would personally find 6 too tight for my work. The second Photoshop or a VM hits swap your computer feels like it has just died. I /never/ want that again

As a user of 8 gigs of ram there are some advantages and disadvantages if you running multiple displays useing multiple aplications that would help alot

I use a 22" and a 37" vizio to play downloaded movies while i use other aplications on the 22" such as burning movies media ect

so i would say just depends on what you are doing if you are recording and tranfering media like i do and switch back and fourth between games apps ect and useing sd's at one time you would need more ram and power just to not bog you're system down


so yes it is worth it but if your just going to be gaming and surfing the web your better off just doing 4 cause the internet is not useing up any resourse you have and games use about 2 gigs if anything unless it is a complicated make which is really not being done yet so i would stay stick with 4-6 or even 8 if you really have a need to do more then just your average user

janno said:

but someone told me (i think it was Sygnus) that this speeds are not reached by the MoBO, and therefor not neccesary. and with a cache of 8-8-8 it`s not neccesary better/faster than 6GB RAM with a cache of 7-7-7.

Click to expand...

That was me that told you that tidbit of information. It's not necessarily that your motherboard won't reach that speed....it's that your CPU is not designed by default to reach that kind of speed....overclocking would be necessary to get up to that area.

Let me try to explain and I'll use my computer as an example. I have an Intel Q9550 quad core CPU which runs natively at 2.83Ghz. The Q9550 has a front side bus speed of 1333Mhz.....and because the Intel chips's are quad pumped..if you take 1333 and divide by 4, you get the true speed of 333Mhz. Now, looking at the specs of an Intel Q9550 shows that it has an 8.5x multiplier...so when you multiply 333 x 8.5 = 2.830Ghz.

So, for my computer, my motherboard takes DDR2 RAM. And remember, DDR means double data rate RAM. So, if you take my Q9550 native bus speed of 333mhz and multiply that by 2 (for double data rate), you end up with an effective speed of 667mhz. So, with a 1,333Mhz FSB motherboard and a Q9550 at stock clock speeds (333Mhz x 8.5), the RAM will run at 667Mhz. Therefore, buying DDR2-800 or DDR2-1000, or DDR2-1200...means that while the RAM "could" run that fast, it's going to continue running at 667Mhz. Thus, unless you plan to overclock and manipulate the machine, being able to run at 800, 1000 or 1200 provides no benefit whatsoever....as the RAM speeds are determined by your FSB speeds.

So, when I built my machine DDR2-667 would have provided the maximum speed that my board and CPU would use by default. However, knowing I wanted to overclock my box a bit, I instead went with DDR2-800 to provide some room before my RAM couldn't handle it.

Now, I started to experiment a bit with overclocking of my CPU. First thing I did was increase the FSB speed to 360 (from 333). With an 8.5 multiplier, that means my overall speed became (360 x 8.5) 3.060Ghz of my CPU. And with the RAM, it went to (360 x 2) 720Mhz. And things were fine here and everything ran fine.

So, I wanted to push things a bit more, so I set my FSB speed to 400 and set my mutiplier from 8.5 simply to 8.0. Thererefore, my CPU was running at 400 x 8 = 3,200Mhz and my RAM was running at it's true native speed of 400 x 2 = 800Mhz.

So, had I done what lots of others did and bought DDR2-1066 simply because I thought it would be so much faster than DDR2-800...I would have had to have overclocked my CPU to 4.264Ghz to actually get the performance of 1066 out of it.
(1066 / 2 = 533). And 533 x 8.0 (lowest multiplier I could use) = 4,264Ghz

So, while DDR2 1066 seems faster than DDR2 800..it totally depends on other factors to determine how fast it would actually be.

I use 4 gigs and I don't recall exceeding 50% very often. Only when running Chrome, WLMM, WMP, WLPG, Ares (P2P program), and Audacity all at the same time. It probably hits 50% without all of them open, but when using WLMM, I usually have all of them going at the same time. Right now I have a few tabs open in Chrome and WMP going and it's at 31%. So I would say at the this point in time more than 6GB probably isn't necessary for the home user.

Just for fun I'm going to try opening every program I currently have installed and see what results are on ram usage

EDIT: 36 programs in use and 54% RAM usage. I'm guessing the programs built in to windows not using much would be the reason why.

2 is not enough. 4 is good. 6 would be perfect. 8 would be amazing! 12 is ridiculous. 16 is unmentionable. 32 is godly.

Internet Badass said:

2 is not enough. 4 is good. 6 would be perfect. 8 would be amazing! 12 is ridiculous. 16 is unmentionable. 32 is godly.

Click to expand...

But unless you really have applications taking advantage of it, more than 4 is likely not going to result in performance benefits. More does not always equal better. Not to mention, the cost of 16, 24 or 32 is going to be extremely high and if you aren't going to actually use it, that would be a huge waste of money.

While actually using all the programs (switching back and forth, I even made a video) I got my RAM to 60% used. The computer didn't hardly slow down at all. The only significant slow down was when trying to upload the video to youtube (which failed) my internet got really slow. I know that if I was using programs like AutoCAD and Photoshop as well the results would be different, but the point remains, whats the point in having RAM that won't be used?

Mine seldom uses all of its 8GB.

only when running some HD encoding apps, and doing a few other things while its encoding I exceed the 4 or even 5GB mark.

For the most part, its rare it goes over 5GB. And never over the 4Gb mark when gaming.

After a couple hours of up time, it does seem 7 uses all of my 8GB of RAM.
Granted, thats all standyby, with an avg. of 2Gb in use at idle, but still using it all.

How much that helps in the overall scheme of things .. Probably not worth the price to upgrade to from 4.

Video encoding & multitasking during is my main reason for it.