New i7 Build - 6gb or 12gb?

Originally Posted by Murry

$560 for 12 gigs of DDR3-1600 is a great deal imho. especially if you are into video editing or CS3/CS4/Photoshop + running Vista. I ordered 12 gigs of Patriot DDR3 to go with the Gigabyte X58board to max out its slots 6 slots. Matches the baby blue slots of the board.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128362
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820220365

Great thread - glad it got bumped recently! However I didn't realize it was a year old and choked when I read the $ amount above. I am building an i7 rig right now and the 12GB of memory I bought came in under $300. For a minute, I panicked thinking that I must have spec'd the wrong memory.

If you are "just" gaming I won't bother going crazy (this may be one of the few areas where gaming doesn't see a benefit). Otherwise I'd give a nudge for the 12 GB package. I do a lot of video editing and want to move to HD video editing - 4GB was sometimes painful with SD video processing. Video/photo/audio editing tasks mixed with a couple of other mathematically intensive apps makes me aware that you can never have enough RAM. I've been (happily) stuck in XP-land for the last many years and expect the 12GB in Win 7 to make multitasking smoother without crazy amounts of disk paging.

Ive had 12 for a little over 6 months now.. I have decided to sell the other 6gbs and go back down to 6.

Originally Posted by Kenjiwing

Ive had 12 for a little over 6 months now.. I have decided to sell the other 6gbs and go back down to 6.

Thanks for sharing. Did you want to back up that affirmation by explaining your reasoning?

Originally Posted by -=PESTILENCE=-

Is it wise to eliminate the page file if you have the memory to do it?

No, unless you would like your system to be brought to it's knees with all the background crap running, that would normally get relegated to the virtual memory.

Originally Posted by madcoder

12 GB for me. There is no ECC available on x58 though, which I don't like. Hooray for a potential bit error about every 3 days. Hopefully I will have replaced this system with an ECC capable one when the sun comes out of the bottom of the 11 year cycle.

ECC is a function of the memory controller, now built into the CPU. If you equipped a P6T6(x58) with a W3580 it should support ECC if my understanding is correct.

Originally Posted by Outamyhead

No, unless you would like your system to be brought to it's knees with all the background crap running, that would normally get relegated to the virtual memory.

All memory is virtual memory in Windows. Did you mean "swapped out", instead? If so, that won't happen -- if the code is running, the pages must be resident and it won't get swapped out.

The two main reasons for not turning off the page file are stability under extreme memory pressure and to use less physical memory while running normally.

12GB is overkill.

Originally Posted by AirCooledMustang

12GB is overkill.

Depends on the application.

Originally Posted by mikeblas

Thanks for sharing. Did you want to back up that affirmation by explaining your reasoning?

Because its overkill.. I took the 6gb out yesterday and did the same thing I do every day and had no difference in anything that I do daily.

Go 12GB now, regret later

Has anyone tried testing 12GB with any games that 'might' 'possibly' 'somewhat' 'possibly' support it? I know LOTRO (Lord of the rings online) has an option that relates to memory which lets you change/modify the amount of memory that is being used by the program. So for example, you can force LOTRO to use as little as like 128MB of ram or let it use as much as ____.

I assume more ram means more textures might be loaded into ram versus reading from the hard drive so when those textures are required they'll load faster? I'm guessing that also once all the ram is used up that you've allowed, lotro would dump the least-recently used textures to make room for more commonly used textures, etc? So in that case, would having 12GB help or does LOTRO max out at like 4GB due to programming limitations? I've heard you need a 64-bit operating system running a 64-bit application to access more than 2GB per application?

Originally Posted by Kenjiwing

Because its overkill.. I took the 6gb out yesterday and did the same thing I do every day and had no difference in anything that I do daily.

Overkill for you is cramped for others, of course.

It depends on what you do, even on this rig with 8 gb of RAM when I do work in Photoshop I can EASILY push towards my memory limit. A high quality 4x5 film transparency scan is like 1.2 gigs before I even begin working on it.

Me personally, I love 8GB on my new computer. I feel that my machine just flies through everything. I personally would love to own 24GB of memory but it's way too costly for me too and for most of the people I know as well. I would not mind 12GB. I just came from an Athlon X2 939 to an Intel X9650 with 8GB of memory.

I want to see what a Core i7 975 will feel like with 12GB of memory. Personally I just don't understand how anyone could want to stay at 4GB.