8gig vs 16gig anyone made the upgrade ? worth it ?
I know it'll hardly make any difference.... but ram looks pretty cheap right now....
I had 8gig running winxp64bit and everyone said I wouldn;t notice the difference... but I did... and it was pretty obvious :-)
I've googled... but all I can see is people asking about it and then little flameboys slagging them off :-(
Wont make any difference.
yeah.... but have you tried it ?
everyone saud the same thing about 4 vs 8 a few years ago.... and they were wrong... it made a massive difference !
I don't think you do enough to warrant it Alan. You might notice a slight improvement in games loading but I doubt it, what's the price difference you're talking about?
For example I have 8Gb in my main rig, I'm using 6Gb of that currently but have all my work open in Photoshop and Firefox using lots of tabs, also Chrome, IE, MSN, email, uTorrent, FTP, VLC. The other 2Gb resource monitor indicates is 'standby' allocated, presumably for if I decide to load up more applications. If I was going to play a game I might consider shutting some of it down, but probably not. My laptop only has 6Gb and I never notice andy issues on that at all.
If you lived in London you could probably go out tonight and help yourself to some from PC World...
Putting the money towards an SSD would make more difference I think :)
I never really made much notice of any benefit of going from 4 to 8gb, but I do notice it now when I have to use software I use on my 8gb comp, on a 4gb machine. Main things I notice it on are things like graphics programs when i CBA to load a few files at a time, so decide to load 10+ gb of photos into photoshop in one go...
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on August 09, 2011, 01:39:52 AMwhat's the price difference you're talking about?
non... I've already got 8gig... but thinking of getting 16 for when my new mb/cpu is sorted...
I keep thinking about an SSD.... but I don;t think they're much better than my raid setup... ok an ssd would blow the raid away in random reads etc... but in normal use how oftern do you actually read at over 200meg sec ? (guess on numbers tbh)
what i mean is, how oftern do you need to read from the hard drive faster than that, and can the rest of the pc keep up with it ?
Random reads is exactly what you should be looking at Alan, most reads will be random for loading games and apps, lots of little files not loaded sequentially. I reckon an SSD would make more difference too, the new ones are bloody fast. HDDs are always the bottleneck in PCs
Why not get a couple and raid them :ptu:
i was thinking about 2 x 120gig SSDs in raid....
but then.... i think a single 240gig drive would be faster..... if I'm just using the onboard raid ?
new drives run at 500meg/sec read and write...
I think the m/b raid would top out before the single drive did vs the 2 drives ?
Nah no chance, especially if your new board is SATA 3, you'll get insane speeds from the SSDs. It should be a no brainer!
If you're serious about performance you could always buy this: http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-480-gb-pcie-ssd-review-1-5gb-read1-25gb-write200000-iops-for-699/ (http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-480-gb-pcie-ssd-review-1-5gb-read1-25gb-write200000-iops-for-699/)
A quote from that site:
QuoteIn other words, the 4-8 kb random write access is the single most crucial access that results in better visible ssd performance. If you are considering buying an ssd and you want the ssd with the best visible upgrade from your present system, you simply find the ssd with the best transfer results at the 4-8 kb random access level.
Quote from: knighty on August 09, 2011, 13:01:24 PM
i was thinking about 2 x 120gig SSDs in raid....
but then.... i think a single 240gig drive would be faster..... if I'm just using the onboard raid ?
new drives run at 500meg/sec read and write...
I think the m/b raid would top out before the single drive did vs the 2 drives ?
Bloody hell! I think I need to upgrade... mine operates at somewhere around 100meg/sec, I knew they had got faster, but didn't realise that much faster
I was just thinking, if you had an SSD and setup a Ramdisk you would have even better performance :
http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk (http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk)
ohhh, I might hold out for one of those "OCZ RevoDrive" ones.... i remmeber thinking about getting one back in the day when they were made with sdram on them ! (tho there wern't many aroudn back then)
my coment of 2 drives in raid vs 1 drive was....
if a single drive can deliver 500meg/sec....
will the onboard raid running 2 drives be any faster ? (There's a but of spu overhead to take into account oo)
and ignoring copying files from one place to another... when will i ever be reading/writing from the drive at more than 500meg/sec ?
pagefile/ramdrive/etc....
I've been dissabling the page file for years... do you really need them with 8 (or more) gig of ram ?
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on August 09, 2011, 13:16:44 PM
If you're serious about performance you could always buy this: http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-480-gb-pcie-ssd-review-1-5gb-read1-25gb-write200000-iops-for-699/ (http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-480-gb-pcie-ssd-review-1-5gb-read1-25gb-write200000-iops-for-699/)
Seems a bit slow? What about this one at 6000MB/s read, 4400MB/s write :w00t:
http://www.fastestssd.com/featured/ssd-rankings-the-fastest-solid-state-drives/#pcie (http://www.fastestssd.com/featured/ssd-rankings-the-fastest-solid-state-drives/#pcie)
On the serious side.. if you scroll up the page there are different categories..
Seems to be the best price vs performance at the 120GB, and number 4 in the rankings on my previous link, for consumer SATA SSDs
Corsair CSSD-F120GB3-BK Force Series 3 120GB Solid State Drive - Read 550MB/s, Write 510MB/s
£146.98
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-CSSD-F120GB3-BK-Force-120GB-Solid/dp/tech-data/B0051A8T52/ref=de_a_smtd (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-CSSD-F120GB3-BK-Force-120GB-Solid/dp/tech-data/B0051A8T52/ref=de_a_smtd)
With drives like this it really boils down to how much data you can chuck down the SATA pipeline, two SSDs in RAID is probably not going to max it out. In any case, the benefits of negligible seek time far outweigh any sequential read speed gains.
As I mentioned before, the 4-8kb random access read/write speeds seem far more improtant for the average user than overall big number sequential read/write speeds.
I've been informed that even if you get an sh*t hot SSD and also have an old skool cool 2tb SATA drive, the bus speeds of the 2tb SATA drive will inhibit the SSD cause it's on the same bus?
I don't quite understand it myself, but I was tempted to get a 100gb Revodrive cause it was about £250 and then get an internal 2tb drive. OR get an internal SSD and use external drives as storage.
As for the 8gb v 16gb, i'm currently planning an upgrade and I'm getting 16gb, I figure you might as well get as much of them stuff as you can cause it's pretty cheap
I'm inclined to agree with Edd now on the RAM front. I've been running a 2Gb ramdisk for a few days now and set all my temp dir's to point to it, the PC is noticeably more responsive even though in theory I've only got 6Gb available for windows to play with.
16Gb with a 2/4Gb ramdisk and virtual memory turned off would be made of WIN, as they say.
I remember using RAM discs on 286:s :D
nige.... what have you got on the ram disk ?
have you just put the disk cash / page file on there ?
or copied filed over to it manually ?
does the program you're useing auto save it to disk when you shutdown/restart ?
I've had the paging file turned off for years, and always assumed it would use the ram instead ? a few years ago nothing got close to using up 8gig for ram :o
p.s. my new m/b has some SATA2 ports... and then some seperare SATA3 ports... so there'd be no problems with other drivis slowing it down...
actually... I' guessing what it really means is if you have some SATA2 and SATA1 drives plugged into the same bus, they all go at SATA1 ? but SATA1 is still plenty fast anyway ? (faster than the drives anyway?) (ignoring the onboard disk cash/ram)
f**k knows. I didn't really understand it anyway. I mean If you plug your SSD into one SATA3 port and then your HDD's into another one? (like some mobo's name SATA ports 0 and 1, and then there is another one named M0 and M1) So you've got your SSD on port 0 and your HDD on port M0. I can't see how the HDD would slow the SSD down myself as it'd be on a completely different bus?
I don't understand it that well anymore. Bring back AGP and ISA slots and single speed RAM.
The difference with a page file and temp folder is that the page file is used in place of having physical ram for computational stuff, temp files is used by programs for tempory storage (e.g running program installations, zip file extraction, caching files, etc). Turning off the page file just means the system will not try to reserve physical ram by pretending the disk is physical memory, it will still use temporary files though.
I'm using the program I linked to earlier, it's free for ramdrives up to 4Gb big, any larger and they ask you to purchase (it's cheap though):
http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk (http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk)
It does do restoring the ramdrive on reboots, I tested it before swapping all my temp folders over just in case :)
I've repointed my Temporary Internet Files folder to it, my Firefox temp files, my Photoshop scratch disk, WinRAR temp, and the windows 'common' temporary folders C:\windows\temp and C:\users\username\Appdata\local\Temp (which most other programs use for temp files)
I'm not sure what else I could point through it but that 2Gb fills quite quickly once I start using Photoshop. It's using between 200-500Mb right now just browsing and with Photoshop closed.
I will probably write up a guide on seting it up this weekend.
Bear in mind I have no idea how games will respond to this yet, I don't know how much they rely on temporary file space. I'm guessing very little though, swap file/physical ram is more the issue there I think.
I thought I'd bump this as the topic of memory requirements has come up in my upgrade advice thread (http://www.tekforums.net/computing-technology-web-communication/best-cheap(ish)-upgrade-path/)
If you work, game or spend a good deal of time on your PC, when building a new system 8GB should be your minimum amount of RAM with 16GB preferable if you want a fast and responsive experience, especially if you don't have an SSD. Frankly, I'm making room for 32GB further down the line.
Visit Advanced System Settings (in Control Panel > System) > Advanced >
Startup and Recovery and under System Failure change write debugging information to
small memory dump or
none to avoid needlessly writing a copy of your RAM to disk in the event of a crash.
Leave Windows pagefile turned on (http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=21013929#p21013929), especially if you have an SSD (http://www.overclock.net/t/1179518/seans-ssd-buyers-guide-information-thread#user_TheDosandtheDonts). Don't follow the old 2.5x RAM rule of thumb, this is garbage - Windows knows what its doing so leave it alone to manage page file size - in Windows 7 especially the algorithms for paging to disk are very clever indeed and designed to work in tandem with newer technology like SSDs. To top it off, MS in agreement:
QuoteShould the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
This is what I am now considering gospel.
N.B. If you do have 16GB+ RAM you could also consider setting up a ramdrive for temp files as above as they are not stored in memory or the pagefile. It's much faster than writing to disk or solid state and cleans itself out whenever you reboot. YMMV but I've found it makes thing a bit snappier despite sacrificing some available RAM, so is only worth doing if you have lots of RAM to begin with.
noooo, turn the page file off no matter what....... I haven't had one turned on in YEARS (since I first installed XP)
the one time (in all these years) I did need one... because some daft program started chewing up ram for no reason.... windows popped up a warning and turned it on for me.... then turned it off again when it wasn't needed any more !!!
plus.... I'd rather save those writes to the ssd tbh....
Those writes are inconsequential to the lifespan of an SSD really.
The gist of it seems to be that your system will feel more responsive initially but once you start using more programs is actually far worse off. In my situation, turning off the page file would be disasterous, I'd have no memory available for anything because Windows would be trying to keep literally everything in RAM - even stuff I'd loaded up on Monday and haven't touched since - leaving no room for current/new stuff. RAM is precious and needs managing. If you think you have enough then it sounds good in theory to turn it off, but the actual amount of RAM you will probably end up using is bound to be more than that (especially if you have <16Gb).
You don't really do much so probably don't notice, but I'd bet when you are gaming its not as fast/smooth as it could be if some of those textures from halfway back on the map you're playing were paged and not still being held in memory, or load times increased because it's still holding the data from the previous maps in memory. I don't know how you would quantify any of that, mind, but I'm going to trust Windows for a change in managing memory.
if you have enough RAM in the first place after all, you never will need to edge into virtual memory anyway, so it makes no sense to turn it off when its a good buffer :)
nope, you're totally wrong
windows is better at managing ram than that
the vast majority of stuff in your ram isn't files you're working on/editing/changing, it's files which are identical to those on your disk... so they don't need to be in ram.... if you start getting low on ram it'll dump those files to disk.... or it'll dump them to disk if they haven't been used in a long time and you start using up ram fast... to make room for the stuff you're working on right now
hell... that was back in winxp days when I spent the time to read up on it properly (code, not opinions)... win 7 should be way ahead of that now
before I had the SSD... I could feel the delay as something I hadn't used in weeks (but was running in the background) loaded up
(a delay that wasn't there if I'd just used it recently)
Aren't you just arguing exactly what I said there, or has one of us misread the other? You're saying Windows is great at managing RAM/paging, which is exactly why I'm arguing the PF should be left on.
Task Manager says I have a 13/16Gb commit total, so basically I'm using twice as much memory as I have, 8Gb in paging. There's no way the machine would run well with VM switched off and I can see the slowdown from switching tasks and having to load all this extra data back in, especially when I go between my browser and Photoshop, that takes a good 5-10 seconds to open properly.
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on March 20, 2012, 23:41:32 PMAren't you just arguing exactly what I said there, or has one of us misread the other? You're saying Windows is great at managing RAM/paging, which is exactly why I'm arguing the PF should be left on.
nope!
if you turn the paging file off, you force windows to use the ram, and it's good enough at handling ram to do everything you want / need
if you have the paging file turned on, it'll use it just because it's there.... because they made the OS for standard users who bought there computer at PC world and who have a gig or two of ram max
I don't run photoshop etc.... but I can have starcraft 2 running a multilayer game in the background, while I check email, brows the web and watch a video, un-rar a dozen files at 5+gig each and remote into the cctv at work at the same time.... without any slowdown... and i don't restart for weeks at a time :p
On my laptop I have noticed a serious improvement in turning the page file off! Now my laptop is running a fast SSD although the bus isn't capable of using it all and my RAM is 3GB so not sure if that makes a difference (i.e. page file being used more) But having the page file on, causes the system to actually run slow than having it off in my specific example and experience
See, whenever I turn it off I start getting major hangs after a while, then it starts telling me i'm out of memory, its making a page file, etc.
Alan, next time you're doing all those things at once, open task manager and see how much memory you're using. I want to believe you but I don't think you're maxing out your memory at all :)
This covers it in layman's terms http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it (http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it)
QuoteAs we've seen, the only tangible benefit of disabling the pagefile is that restoring minimized applications you haven't used in a while is going to be faster. This comes at the price of not being able to actually use all your RAM for fear of your applications crashing and burning once you hit the limit, and experiencing a lot of weird system issues in certain applications.
The vast majority of users should never disable the pagefile or mess with the pagefile settings—just let Windows deal with the pagefile and use the available RAM for file caching, processes, and Superfetch. If you really want to speed up your PC, your best options are these:
Upgrade your RAM.
Clean off the crapware—the biggest cause of system slowdown.
Switch to Microsoft Security Essentials and stop paying for bloated Windows security packages.
Windows 7 handles multi-tasking much better than Windows XP did.
And a study with some tests:
http://www.howtogeek.com/95915/heres-why-disabling-the-windows-pagefile-is-pointless/ (http://www.howtogeek.com/95915/heres-why-disabling-the-windows-pagefile-is-pointless/)
Really, I guess it boils down to how you use your PC and knowing how much memory you are using as to whether you should disable it.
how much ram are you using ?
you're right, i never top mine out...
have you tried closing firefox etc.. once in a while and re-opening it (then do restore previous session)
i can regain 2gig of ram by doing that if it's been open for a week straight
sounds like your problem is memory leaks like above and not a lack of ram!
Yeah I've tried that plenty - I often reboot my copy as it updates every day (Aurora beta channel). Firefox uses about 1-1.5Gb, I haven't had a leaky version for ages, its just the amount of stuff I have open. I can end up working on 10-20 websites over the course of a week and have to keep chopping and changing between them, then factor in social tabs, gmail, web design related sites, etc. You end up with 100s of tabs open and no really good way of reducing the memory footprint. Assess how much I often have open and it's easy to see why it wouldn't be practical to do that, I really hammer my machine. I can't be dealing with constantly opening and closing stuff all the time, its counter productive when you switch tasks as much as I usually have to:
Take Firefox then factor in an open copy of IE, Chrome and Safari for site testing. Then Photoshops huge memory footprint (a couple of GB easy), then Illustrator. Then someone will have emailed me a crappy Powerpoint and a Word doc and a PDF. Then I'll have a 10Mb CSV feed open in Excel, 5/6 notepad windows with scripts, snippets, etc in. Live Mail open, Skype for calls, Spotify for music, FTP program, uTorrent, Steam, a Bitcoin client and more often than not the Miner itself running (except when I'm doing lots of photoshop work, its unbearable) - then the worst bloatware of them all, Live Messenger!
For me to turn off paging I'd need 16GB minimum I reckon, 32Gb would be 'safe' for it IMO.
Quote from: knighty on August 09, 2011, 01:15:14 AM
yeah.... but have you tried it ?
everyone saud the same thing about 4 vs 8 a few years ago.... and they were wrong... it made a massive difference !
As far as I have seen there is no proof of that and a great deal to show it wasn't true at the time, for most it isn't true now either.
It wouldn't make any difference at all to anyone who used a 32 bit OS, they just would not see it. Then most people don't use enough programs simultaneously to use 2GB of actual memory. I've run Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars at the same time as Firefox and a few other bits and pieces, that didn't even hit the swap file.
Even worse it takes time to search the memory to see if the stuff has been loaded, which can slow your computer down if it then has to go and load from the HD.
So you have to be using a 64 bit OS to see any difference and loading a lot of stuff into memory.
Where it does benefit is if you are using so many programs simultaneously that it's always ending up visiting the HD, even then it depends on if it's using the swap files or accessing actual program data. If the first then extra memory would help, if the second you would be better off considering one or more SSDs first.
Either of which should put you in the top 1% of users :bow: