I currently have:
4 sticks of 1Gb (4Gb) 1066 DDR2 RAM
Would I see a significant difference with:
4 sticks of 2Gb (8Gb) 800 DDR2 RAM?
What is you ram usage like at the moment?
In what respect?
I play modern games occasionally (Far Cry 3, DCS A-10 (flight sim) etc) without significant evidence of struggle but I could do with some more.
Other than that I do Photoshop and some vid now and then.
I'm up for the move to 8Gb as my last upgrade for this machine but not sure moving down to 800Mhz will negate the benefit.
More RAM is better than less faster RAM as it means less paging to disk. Ignore anyone that says otherwise!
Also, the difference at DDR2 speeds is sweet fack all really
Ok, cool. Thanks. :)
Only really makes a difference if you are paging to disk.
If you run 8gb of ram but are only ever seeing 30% use of physical memory then you'll actually see a slowdown due to the decrease in speed.
Windows only uses swap when it needs to due to all the other applications using up your physical ram, granted there is a margin there in that if I was seeing 80% phys mem usage I'd say do the upgrade (as you use photoshop and do vid editing this is highly likely) but if you're using it to browse the Internet, do office work and watch a few movies, I'd probably go with sticking with the higher data rate ram as you will ( even though ram operations are imperceptible to human senses) cut the performance of your ram.
Windows uses enough RAM for itself before you even start with apps, those games all will make use of the available RAM and Photoshop eats RAM for breakfast (knowing the quality of Eagle's work too I bet he's using large files, lots of layers, caching and history states) so IMO its a no brainer. 4GB is sub par.
Aye but he's running 4gb ddr2 ram... He is likely running windows XP with that out of date spec ;) and that doesn't hoof as much ram as say windows 8 for example.
Well, the only way to know for sure is for him to have a typical amount of work open and show us a screengrab of task manager's performance tab.
the problem with that though is that in things like Photoshop the paging only starts when you start doing something, not sitting watching task manager.
for the price of ram now, I think it's well worth it
I noticed the difference going from 4gb to 8gb on winxp... that was when ram was expensive and I still thought it was well worth it after :-)
Just make sure you are running a 64bit OS otherwise the upgrade will be pointless :-)
Quote from: XEntity on January 20, 2013, 12:00:17 PM
Just make sure you are running a 64bit OS otherwise the upgrade will be pointless :-)
good point
also, 8gig of ddr2 is £80 now.... more than I expected... but still well worth it
wat's the rest of the spec of your machine like ? it might only be a couple of hundred for a new cpu/mb/ram ?
• Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q6600 2.4GHz
• Asus P5K-e
• Vista 64
• AMD Radeon 6870 2Gb
Money isn't an object - just no time to do a rebuild.
why you still running Vista its one of the worst OS's ever made, up their with ME.
Because it's fast, 100% stable and hasn't let me down since I first installed it.
Besides, I can't stand the new versions of Windows Mail (can't stand alternatives either).
Quote from: Eagle on January 20, 2013, 18:51:57 PM
Because it's fast, 100% stable and hasn't let me down since I first installed it.
Besides, I can't stand the new versions of Windows Mail (can't stand alternatives either).
with a bit of option tweaking, windows live mail looks just like outlook express
I know because i hated the new one too !
p.s. rest of the system looks good, go for the 8gig ram
or... mb/cpu/ram/psu/gfx upgrade for about 300 to 350
Quote from: knighty on January 20, 2013, 19:07:50 PM
...rest of the system looks good, go for the 8gig ram
Just nabbed it. :)
I hear people bemoan Vista64 all the time but as ever, YMMV... I've ran it since it came out and it's never failed me... and as fast as the day I installed it. Only times I've ever reinstalled (twice) is through hardware failures. It's been superb since day 1, IMO.
It's not broke - and does the job very nicely - so I won't be 'fixing' it any time soon. :)
I never had a problem with Vista either (Windows 7 is fine by me but the new Windows Live apps are getting worse and worse tbh, which is the downside of upgrading). But eventually its a guarantee they will take away support for the older versions. Windows 8 is god awful, if you can do so you might as well skip 7/8 and see what their next release is like.
Whilst I don't hate Vista, there aren't enough words to describe how much better Windows 7 was. Maybe similar on the surface but good god it performed better when you're under fire.
I just upgraded to 16gb today and my machine is fast as fook now. Debian looks its swap and before I was maxing out all cores at 100% doing any kind of CPU intensive task. Now its a joy.
And I should add 16gb for 60 quid from tekheads. You're just tight if you buy any less :)
Turned out the RAM in me mobo was 800Mhz anyway but the 8Gb is now in.
sh*t the bed - what a difference! Wish I'd done this years ago. :thumbup:
Glad to have helped ;)