more RAM!

[Bushman5]

treated myself to more ram.....seeing as it was on sale by my local computer store, and they were kind enough to call me informing they saved me a set of it...

my games are absolutely flying...... :devil::devil::devil::devil::devil:

8 GB of dual channel DDR3 RAM!

my MOBO can support 16GB, so at some point, just for kicks and giggles, i will put 16GB in.........

 

[pparks1]

How much RAM were you coming from? And which games in particular?

I'd assume that you were upgrading from 4Gb to 8GB...but I wouldn't expect much improvement with games if this were the case. If you went from 2GB to 8GB...then yes.

 

[Wishmaster]

I honestly couldnt tell any difference from 4GB -> 8Gb of RAM for Gaming.

However, I do alot of video encoding, mostly with 1080P material.
In that area, it did help.

The extra RAM seems to made things smoother. I often have multiple scripts open, resizing and editing as well as the encoding process itself.

But for gaming and most everything else I commonly do, It didnt seem to help that much at all.

 

[pparks1]

I honestly couldnt tell any difference from 4GB -> 8Gb of RAM for Gaming.

However, I do alot of video encoding, mostly with 1080P material.
In that area, it did help.

The extra RAM seems to made things smoother. I often have multiple scripts open, resizing and editing as well as the encoding process itself.

But for gaming and most everything else I commonly do, It didnt seem to help that much at all.

That's exactly what I would expect.

 

[Keiichi25]

Actually, Wishmaster... It would depend more on what you were doing on the computer persay.

In my case, under XP, I was only seeing 3.0 Gigs on my system. I was consistently hitting near cap running Wow, a web browser, a RSS Feed reader, a VOIP app (Either Ventrilo or Teamspeak), AV, Googletalk, maybe music. And that isn't including the fact there was VM page swapping going on like crazy. With Windows 7, while it didn't improve my gaming persay, it also didn't slow the system too much due to VM swapping.

Also with things the way they are now... I am barely using half my memory as it is which makes things a bit more tolerable.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
Sorry to sound a bit bit like the "5th" player in a String Quartet but often adding more RAM after you've got an adequate amount doesn't deliver the performance you might expect.

Things like running VIRTUAL MACHINES or very large databases or having Multiple concurrent users (servers, Web sites etc) will benefit hugely by more RAM.


Editing (or creating) HD video streams can benefit of course but this will also need FAST processors to do it at acceptable speed and more RAM (up to a point) might benefit big Photoshop users.

Single user systems will see FAR MORE benefit by IMPROVING THE I/O -- faster Disks will probably improve your system NO END - probably even more than a faster processor too.

Games aren't often RAM intensive -- especially these days where a lot of stuff is actually done within a separate GPU chip.

Typical Home and single user applications won't often benefit from having more than 4GB RAM (although if its cheap enough there's nothing WRONG in adding it).

I would still tend to go for something like SSD drives if it was within my budget before massively increasing RAM.

Optimising systems is a difficult task since a lot of it is based on the work you actually DO on your computer -- and this is hugely varied.

Most people tend to surf the net or perform relatively undemanding (computer wise, not Intellectually wise) tasks that don't consume a huge amount of resources.

I'll almost bet that for a significant percentage of users out there a standard Netbook is probably sufficient provided they can plug in an external monitor. My experience is that it isn't much fun looking at a large EXCEL spreadsheet on a small netbook screen.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[madtownidiot]

a little off topic and probably the wrong forum even, but 8 Gigs of ram is just enough to run vBox with VMs of xp, vista and windows 7 simultaneously in ubuntu, all in 32 bit color.. including transparency and aero effects in the windows 7 vm.. while playing doom 3 in wine on the 4th desktop.

 

[Bushman5]

running GIMP, Virtual OS's, etc.

even when not running those i noticed a marked increase in CRYSIS's performance compared to before.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
as I said for running VM's - especially simultanously then more RAM is a good idea.
Maybe also for GIMP and Photoshop but a decent SSD drive would work almost as good for Photoshop scratch areas whilme really BOOSTING performance of the OS.

Just increasing RAM won't normally buy you much once you get past 4GB if you aren't running the apps outlined above or you aren't running a multi user server system.

Cheers
jimbo