Why Do You Need More Than 6GB of Memory?

I had 8GB on my Q6600 rarely did I go over 5gb of usage even when running premier or vegas, or premier / ae. the question is how often will you have 15apps running including premier pro? and will the extra mhz from the oc u lose make up the diff? etc
 
So Kyle you are running Win7 on your day to day work pc? You're off Vista?
 
I'll post my standard picture I do in all of these threads.

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Virtualization FTW. :cool:
 
I can kill 4gb with no issue. I run a wide-format printshop primarily for Arch/Eng plans. In AutoCAD I don't seem to flex the system to much. When I get into the fine-art/photo wide format color that's when all hell breaks loose.

Photoshop kills my system. Try doing a Photomerge with a dozen 8 megapixel photos. At times interpolating a picture for a poster kills the system. Processing the photo for printing will max out the RAM. At times I have to go and place the bitmap image into InDesign to print. InDesign seems more efficient at printing than Photoshop. Granted that these are extreme situations, ie 42" x 120" photo/print.

For the most part, 4gb is OK for everyday use in my situation. More would be nice though. I've seen some crazy workstations from guys that do vehicle wraps use.
 
tricky0502 said:
So Kyle you are running Win7 on your day to day work pc? You're off Vista?
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I first upgraded my Vista 64 with the Win 7 and then ran with a couple of weeks on the Core 2 Quad, then built a new i7 920 running at 3.6GHz and did a fresh install of Win7 64. Could not be happier.
 
It seem s to me that there are only a few select people who need more than 6gb if ram. For most people, even gamers, it's probably a little overkill.
 
I cant speak for win7 specifically, but I have server 2008SP2 which is 97% the same beast. I have 16 gigs of RAM and I notice it doing all sorts of kickass things.
For example if your copying a huge file around it will gorge as much of it into RAM as it can and then spool it out of RAM at its leisure closing the file copy dialog really quickly. Even as its doing that, you could open the same file in a video editing or muxing program and start editing it. Its funny that Microsoft hasn't marketed this new kickassery but windows 2008 and 7 seem to aggressively cache the hell out of everything now making the system much zippier.
Now, with all this in mind I'd still like to say given the choice between another $200 of RAM or an SSD, I would go with SSD. Its the most dramatic performance enhancement you can buy for your PC right now bar none. 6GB extra is awesome, however your programs loading in less than a second is pretty righteous too.

BTW Kyle, when are you going to answer my question on DX11? If current vid cards are arrays of programmable stream processors, then why do we need new vid cards for DX11?
 
It's never enough dude. I'll always be having more and more firefox windows/tabs open, usually totalling 100-200 easy. At some point, it'll be a memory leak issue, or single threaded firefox will peg a cpu. Then what?

And if it's the memory part that's the concern, it'd just mean I'd be running around with 500-600 tabs say and settling at the same sluggish point as before with less ram and less tabs.

So in conclusion, more ram = more messy user.

I say we all go back to 640k
 
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This is my normal usage; vista64 w/ i7920. vbox w/ ubu 9.04 takign 2gb; rest being vista/firefox/steam/xfire/misc. The beauty of this is I leave my ubu full screen integrated on one monitor; and full screen game on the other with zero lag in game or in vm; left4dead full screen window mode is amazing for multi tasking while infected between spawns. (2x22" westy's)
 
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I've always said that content creation/heavy multitasking/anything memory intensive calls for having as much memory as you can run on the motherboard. A buddy of mine didn't believe it till he noticed how smooth Photoshop and his 3d rendering was when I gave him my old set of Corsair DDR1 sticks for his P4-based Dell. He was originally running on 512MB. with the sticks he had two gigs of memory to work with. It still ran pretty slow for obvious reasons, but the one thing he did notice is that it doesn't seem to struggle as much as it used to. I don't know if this is placebo effect or not, but the difference was there.

Now when he gets a job doing what he does best, he said he's coming to me to put together a real workstation for him so he can stop trying to scrape by on his bronto-PC, as he calls it.
 
I wish I had over 6gb of ram. I currently have 4gb in my system with a quad core and I can bring it to its knees when using 3ds Max, Photoshop and other programs like that and I could probably do the same with 6gb :(
 
One thing not many people talk about...Win7 will load more to memory IF you have more memory.

Say you have 2GB, you will hardly ever go over 2GB in use, but put 6GB in, running the same apps and it will sit over 3 GB a lot of time doing nothing. The more ram, the more is in ram and the quicker multitasked items will respond. Just the way it's designed.

More is always better, but it can lengthen your boot time as the OS now loads more data from the drives when it starts. Then again, Kyle's disk speed is almost as fast as his ram speed anyway, so that probably isn't a concern. :)
 
I'm running my 920 with 12GB of RAM. Why? Thanks for asking.

On occasion I can work from home. Nothing sucks more than having some down time and not being able to get in a bit of Warcraft because you are bound to a VPN. VirtualBox to the rescue. The company supplied VPN software doesn't support Vista 64 bit but WinXP Pro in VirtualBox does.

I can have VirtualBox running with 4GB allocated to it while WinXP inside of it has a VPN connection to work. Inside of that I can use Rosetta Stone or Office 2007 if I feel like it, too. Internet explorer, Firefox and IM run while logged into the VPN as well.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Vista is chugging along with Warcraft not even noticing that there is something else going on.

While playing MP3 files in Winamp and surfing the web.

As my system is dual boot I can use the same WinXP image when doing things in there. On my old machine I had no issues running WoW under Wine with my old 8800 GTS 640. With my GTX 295 on my new system WoW is about as stable as a teacup in a hurricane.

I currently am running ImDisk Virtual Disk and have allocated 8GB of RAM to it. I think that when I rip a DVD it is my harddrive slowing me down. I'm copying an unprotected movie to that ramdrive and then going to hit it with Handbrake. Previously I could rip this movie at about 333fps. It would take about 10 minutes per pass and have a bitrate of 1024Kbps. My CPU just sat there insulted.

Upping the bitrate would cause the process to take longer and my CPU to cry. Ripping at 8096Kbps things only happened at about 96fps.

I am hopeful that this test succeeds. For some reason I seemed to have an issue with a different DVD of mine.
 
On my laptop just browsing with 4Gb I rarely break 1Gb.. On my desktop however it usually hangs just over 1Gb
 
I run Vista Home Premium fine with my 2GB. I'm sure I would notice a difference with 3GB, but prolly not enough to care. When I jump ship to Win7 I'll up it to 8GB and we'll see if I actually do notice. I'm simply not a heavy memory user I guess??
 
Running 12GB of 1600 here with Titan SSD. Cannot get the memory above 1200 though.
Disabled the page file. Been running very smooth at 4.0GB for some months.
Love it!!
 
On our workstations at work, (dual xeon quad cores) some have 8 and some have 16. The render farm machines have 8,
with the 16GB machines it is possible to create a file in 3dsMax which will really bog down the farm because textures have to start swapping to disk. that can quadruple frame render times. with the 8GB machine you would notice that right away and do something about it.

Mind you i much prefer working on the 16GB ones and just keep an eye on the memory load when test rendering. because then you can leave CS3 and all th other sundry programs running without worrying about it.
For local rendering, I always set the affinity of Max to only use 7 cores, then i can work on something else without any trouble (even another instance of Max) max usually only uses one core when modeling or whatever but uses all of them for rendering.

I have just purchased a i7 920(just got the chip, havent built anything up) for home use, and will be switching to 64 bit, i will probably go with 12GB, the price is low compared to motherboard and CPU.
 
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That's my main machine with me not actively doing anything. I'd probably kill to get another 4 gig right now but I can't afford it. As it is, I find myself limited a bit when I start up much more than what I have running right now and it gets a hell of a lot worse when I'm running some VMs. Once I start up a couple VMs there's not much RAM left over.

I'm sure some would say that 4 gig is enough according to that screenshot but it's not even close. Sure, it looks like there's plenty of memory left to play around with but that's not the case. If I open up any more than what I already have open the system starts losing a lot of snappiness because less and less is able to be cached which means more is written to the page file or has to be thrown out of RAM to make room for something else.

All I know is that my next system will not have less than either 8 or 12 gig in it depending on whether I end up with a triple or dual channel motherboard. 8 gig is probably the minimum I can run with comfortably and that's before I fire up some VMs or load up content creation software or start up a game.

 
Duffman247 said:
Does having around 12GB of ran affect your OC at all? I was always under the assumption you want to put in just as much ram as you really need to get the best OC
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What limited testing on it I've done has shown me that up to about DDR3 1600MHz you can get away with 12GB of RAM just fine on the Core i7. Going past DDR3 1600MHz didn't work for me, but then again I didn't get much time to work on it before I had to move on to other things. In other words, with the right RAM your good to go for the most part. With RAM that clocks really high, maybe not.
 
I have rarely used more than 4GB of RAM. However, I upgrade my full system every 2 years...so I figure its best to max out when I can just in case I might run into a situation in next couple years does manage to use more than 6 GB of RAM. 8GB of DDR2 Ram was $100 dollars when I purchased it Nov. 08. RAM is so damn cheap right now, I don't see why not. Vista and Win7 love every bit of RAM you can throw at them.

The best part of 8GB of RAM? I run out of taskbar space before I run out of memory.
If I launch a game, I never worry about it ever running out of memory, nor do I ever shut down other programs before doing so. I never have to tweak Vista to only run certain processes to save RAM.
 
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The number you should be looking at is not "Available" but "Free" if you want to know if you're making use your memory.

In Win7 if you open the Resource Monitor from Task Manager and go to the memory tab, you can see better graph of current memory allocation.
 
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tricky0502 said:
you just sold me!! i've been on the fence on what to install. i'm about to reformat and i wasn't sure what to install. now i need 8gb ram...

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1427940
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Keep in mind that the current RC Win7 is NOT upgradeable to commercial Win7 RTM vesion, so you WILL have to do a full reinstall Q1 of next year when it expires. Win 7 is supposed to go on sale in October, so you might want to wait.

kraemer007 said:
BTW Kyle, when are you going to answer my question on DX11? If current vid cards are arrays of programmable stream processors, then why do we need new vid cards for DX11?
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With that logic we should be able to use our GPUs infinitely on any DX instruction set, right? There are limitations.

Freezebyte said:
And the E-Penis wars continue...I hardly ever use 4gigs on my setup
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Damn you all! I would have 24GB if the IC's were still not so damn expensive!!!
 
zkosmos said:
The number you should be looking at is not "Available" but "Free" if you want to know if you're making use your memory.

In Win7 if you open the Resource Monitor from Task Manager and go to the memory tab, you can see better graph of current memory allocation.
Click to expand...

Yeppers, I run resource monitor all the time on my second screen when play-testing games. You can see a LOT of what is going on.

Win7ResourceMonitor.gif
 
I have noticed a major improvement in my Win7 RC1 build with 3GB of ram. It seems more responsive and snappier. I can totally see Kyle's point about the 6GB ram sizing. I chalk this up to the task scheduler and kernel changes that have been made in Win7.
If you read on channel 9 Korna...what's his name from Sysintenals talks about this on a webcast. I find this very interesting as the finishing touches have not been placed on Win7 and some of the lingering bugs have not been squashed yet.
I predict we are going to see some surprising scaling up on Win7 in heavy production environments like GIS, CADD and Graphics Design.

Apple better be scared…………………..
 
for the average user, 2-3gb is sufficient

most ethusiasts need 4-6 gb of ram,

if your doing something crazy, then 8-12gb (or 24gb...)

I am going to go for 6gb when I go core i7, probably next month. I have 4 now in my main rig with vista x64 sp2, no problems for gaming, word, msn, icq, etC.

All depends on what you do
 
Well i guess I learned something new here about Windows Vista/ 7, had no idea that Vista/ 7 have those cache thing that could use GBs of RAM
 
When I did my Core i7 build I went for the 12GB of memory and I couldn't be happier. I've gotten up over 6GB being used with a couple of VMs running at once. BUT, I'm sure that memory utilization is going to go up as time goes by and new programs come out. This is a fresh build that I plan to keep for at least 2 years so I'm planning ahead with the 12GB.
 
All these talks about 12gb memory, anyone know any good deals on them? I just ordered the i7 bundle from intel. With the weird configuration of intel mobo(4 memory slots), I need to find 4gbx3 ddr3 kit for it.
 
Thanks for the input on this, Kyle. I was debating whether or not to go 12GB or 6GB. I do some video editing (family home videos), Photoshop and quite a bit of programming. That, and a lot of gaming. But, I really love to multitask (Some call it ADD, I call it multitasking!), so the extra RAM would help out a lot in keeping programs open and switching easily.

Coupled with an i7, I think I should be good for a few months... :D

Out of curiosity, Kyle, do you happen to play FSX (MS Flight Sim)? Would it be possible to include it in your reviews of video cards and/or CPU's? I know there is a lot of people that play this, and I would love to see some benchies. I wonder how it would do with more RAM. I know I can max it my system with 4 GB of RAM. But, I am running a LOT of addons, too...
 
Oh, and another thing, Kyle.... Why aren't your cores at 100%... Doesn't Folding@Home max those out!? ;)
 
On my primary box, 8 GB works out fairly nicely. a couple of gigs for the XP VM I use while VPN'd into work instead of having to bust out the laptop or unhook my 24" LCD from my desktop, a copy of RIPBot and/or MCEBuddy re-encoding in the background, plus whatever other apps or additional VMs I have running to tinker/test.

Its really nice to not have to close anything out, just move it to the background and it will be instantly responsive to you when you are ready for it.
 
With a crazy avisynth script and the slowest of the slow x264 settings, I'm sure that even 6GB wouldn't cut it for 1 process. ;)

Heck, I'm running one instance of x264 with 'average' settings and its only taking up ~800MB.
 
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Today's systems don't have enough memory capacity if you ask me! 4GB dimms give you 24GB on x58 and that's not enough. You have to go to a server/workstation platform and it gets expensive to get 32/64/96/128+ GB RAM FAST! I was working with just 8GB FBDIMM with a 20 disk SAS array paging bad before going to 64GB with 12 64GB SLC SSD...

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Computers will never be fast enough if you're doing HD in the pro field! 100Mbps 1080i video eats cpu for lunch but I must say the Nehalem Xeons are nice. With upcoming 8 core (16 w/HT) per socket and 256+ GB of ram it should work nice for rendering.
 
Dang it looks like 12gb will truly benefit me. Thanks by the way was just wondering this and if it affects overclocking, kyles results and this tid bit from Dan_D
has shown me that up to about DDR3 1600MHz you can get away with 12GB of RAM just fine on the Core i7
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leaves me now no choice but to go with 12gb, dang it why do i actually use the programs it will benefit. (Actually happy because now I have a reason to upgrade, but can't let on to that with the economy)
 
Ur_Mom said:
Out of curiosity, Kyle, do you happen to play FSX (MS Flight Sim)? Would it be possible to include it in your reviews of video cards and/or CPU's? I know there is a lot of people that play this, and I would love to see some benchies. I wonder how it would do with more RAM. I know I can max it my system with 4 GB of RAM. But, I am running a LOT of addons, too...
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No I did not play those types of games, but read our last CPU Scaling article, FSX is covered in pretty good detail there. It is still one of the last CPU hogs. :)

Ur_Mom said:
Oh, and another thing, Kyle.... Why aren't your cores at 100%... Doesn't Folding@Home max those out!? ;)
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Because with two or three machines in my office at a time running CPU/GPU torture and stability tests I like to keep be below 90F.
 
eastpetersen said:
Dang it looks like 12gb will truly benefit me. Thanks by the way was just wondering this and if it affects overclocking, kyles results and this tid bit from Dan_D leaves me now no choice but to go with 12gb, dang it why do i actually use the programs it will benefit. (Actually happy because now I have a reason to upgrade, but can't let on to that with the economy)
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I am running my RAM at 1440. I don't know of any reason to push it up for what I am doing. Jeez, there is SO MUCH bandwidth there. Might be good for benchmark monkeys, but not likely going to land you much in the real world.
 
Not just windows users. 12 GB of memory is nice for some of the simulations and data processing I do as part of my research. Honestly 32 GB would be sure fine if I start using more than 1 or 2 workers for large data sets.
 
I haven't seen a point to have more than 4 GBs in my own machine. This past week, I've been converting videos for my Zune. I'll use one program to convert them to .mp4, while the Zune software will then convert what I've converted into something the Zune will use. I run them at the same time and I only hit around 2.2 GB of usage. My comp will only recognize 3.5 GBs.
 
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