MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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Currently running an Asus P7P55D-E mobo with 8Gb (o/c i5 3.4, SSD, ATI 6870, W7 64bit blah blah) which is pretty damn quick at just about everything it needs to do. But with some sticks of RAM being bloody cheap I'm wondering if it's worth upping to 16Gb? Have heard people say it's pointless, games don't use it and only certain apps like PS and video editing are really going to use it ... I do a bit of the latter but mainly use image and processor intensive apps.
What say you? Ta
Do it, like you say cheap as chips (see what I did there!) so why not 🙂
Are you running out of the RAM you are currently using? Probably highly unlikely with 8GB already.. so the answer is no..
Spend it on useful stuff, like shiny bike bits, instead...
best thing to do is use the cpu and ram meter from the gadgets in windows 7. keep an eye on it from as you use your pc and look how much ram is being used.
usual day to day use doesn't warrent 16gb at all. You'll not notice any difference. If you're using it for video editing, photoshop, 3D simulations etc then yes
look at your memory usage in the resource manager - if you are getting a high percentage of physical memory used then put some more in.
I was getting 90-95% of my 6gb physical memory used, upped the memory to 12gb and now the equivalent usage has only 80% physical memory used.
Yeah, I was thinking about monitoring usage (when under stress) to see if it's being maxed enough. Will take a butchers for a couple of days and see how it goes. Ta
You don't necessarily [b][i]need[/b][/i] it now, but it's cheap now, so why not get it and future-proof?
future proof from what??
Lazy developers 😉
What do you use the PC for ?
As above, depends what you are using your computer for.. I regularly run out of RAM with only 8gb. 😯
You can never have too much ram. If you're a gamer then the 16gig will help, but normal day to day use and you won't see much, if any, difference.
Battlefield 3 however, will use it 😀
However, ram is stinking cheap so there's no harm in slapping more in.
if you're a gamer 16gb will help? fail to see a game using 16gb. Honestly look at the resource monitor after you've played not even battlefield 3 uses more than 3-4gb's
A GPU with a large amount of RAM is another matter.
Do you do any computational physics?
Bah, who am I kidding - get it anyway! Pile it in while it's cheap, say you don't think of upgrading for a few years and DDR4 appears out of nowhere; the cost for your RAM will start going up! It's a PITA to get cheap 2GB sticks of DDR2 now.
future proof from what??
Floods.
For day to day 'typical' usage, I doubt you'll see any practical change in speed going from 8 to 16. If you're doing memory intensive tasks (someone mentioned video editing) or have lots of stuff on the go at once then it'd be more likely to be worthwhile.
Bear in mind though, Windows may use memory if it's available for file caching and the like, so even if you're not memory starved at the moment that doesn't necessarily imply that more will be an outright waste.
Honestly look at the resource monitor after you've played not even battlefield 3 uses more than 3-4gb's
6gb out of my 8gb is used by BF3.
For the price, stick some more RAM in!
I see you said you do a bit of video editing, more RAM will definately help. If you use Premiere, then a CUDA core enabled graphics card would help a lot (off loads CPU processing to GPU). Ditch the ATI and get a Nvidia GTX260 or better card. If you only have 1 hard drive, then another 2 drives would also help a lot, as you could set one as your scratch disk, but prices have shot through the roof for HD's.
[url= http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-08-24-n14.html ]Good developers are lazy...[/url]
Hmm, looks like Chrome (typically 10-20 tabs) and Outlook are the memory hoggers, and the usual work-related apps are actually not demanding as much as I expected.
Tend to work a lot with very media rich PowerPoint files (easily 75_ slides, 100+ images + videos + Flash), GIMP, CS4 and various online/offline authoring/editing tools that seem to be more CPU intensive.
CPUs not really being stretched beyond 25% even under load (bar the occasional spike). And memory rarely more than 50%.
SSD used only for the 'main' apps and work files - have 2 other HDDs for other stuff plus an external jobby.
Not really bothered about gaming because Crysis, Skyrim and BF3 are running proper quick and without issues.
Might go for it, or might hold back - especially if I end up going for a Sandybridge in 12-18 months time (which will require a mobo swap and therefore most likely sticks as well).
of course only apps with full 64 bit support will use anything above 4gb...
And to think I thought I was doing well working in Photoshop with a hefty 1Gb RAM. That in my lightning-fast 1.25 GHz twin-processor Mac tower. But then, a lot of the scans [i]were[/i] only 100Mb or so...
of course only apps with full 64 bit support will use anything above 4gb...
Yeah, but that's [i]per app[/i] (and double what you'd have available under x86 anyway).