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 Post subject:Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Tue May 19, 2009 12:53 pm 
 

Joined:Sun Jun 10, 2007 11:41 am
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So I currently have

Radeon 4830
Phenom 9500
2GB of Ram
Vista 32-bit

If I bought another four gigs of ram would I notice a big upgrade? And would it be worth the trouble that comes with using 64 bit vista?


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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Tue May 19, 2009 2:40 pm 
Literally Nine
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You _could_ opt for more RAM, but you should check for a performance bottleneck first. If there's something you're doing that's particularly slow, figure out what's holding the program back. Is it the GPU? CPU? Hard disk? RAM size/speed?

If you have too little RAM, you may still run the application, but it would be paging in and out of the hard disk a lot.

If your hard disk is too slow (or you have a bizarre sort of fragmentation issue like my Mom's computer had -- more on this later on my blog), then you'll have slow boot sequences and slow program loads/saves.

What particular reason are you wanting to upgrade your RAM for?

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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Tue May 19, 2009 11:26 pm 
 

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32-bit Vista can only use 3.59gb or some other number between 3.50 and 4gb of RAM (Depends on who you ask) so you're gonna need Vista 64 to see the extra 2gb.

I personally have 8gb in my box although i'm only running 32-bit and still my machine is blisteringly fast.

I don't know much about AMD Chips, but I can tell you you'll see a huge difference if you swap that 4830 out for a 4870 or GTX250, both of which are dropping in price a hella lot.

Sometimes it's just better to get a fresh box than upgrade in drips and drabs though.


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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Wed May 20, 2009 3:49 pm 
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I'm thinking of getting a new box myself (just gotta bother enough people for the scratch), but I dunno if it's getter to go with an AMD Phenom II X4 Black Box with 4GB of DDR2 or an Intel Core i7 with 12GB of DDR3. Granted, the former is far less expensive than the latter...

And then there's the question of SLi'ing two 9800s or going with a single 260...

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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Wed May 20, 2009 6:18 pm 
Literally Nine
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Quote:
32-bit Vista can only use 3.59gb or some other number between 3.50 and 4gb of RAM (Depends on who you ask) so you're gonna need Vista 64 to see the extra 2gb.
Technically speaking, 32-bit operating systems are _capable_ of using more than 4GB of RAM, through the use of PAE, but I suppose Microsoft wanted to find some sort of selling point for 64-bit Vista, so they crippled the 32-bit version with a 4GB limit.
Quote:
I personally have 8gb in my box although i'm only running 32-bit and still my machine is blisteringly fast.
I hope your OS supports PAE...

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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Thu May 21, 2009 4:08 am 
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so you're gonna need Vista 64 to see the extra 2gb.
That's not entirely true. You won't need "Vista 64". You will need a 64bit Os though. But there are much better choises than [cough]Vista[/cough].


First of all, since you have chosen tu run 32bit, I would switch back to Windows XP. Much more efficient in Ressources and more stable and ... Direct X10 / 10.1? Pffff...

And if you really want the graphical gimmics, you could still install a second Os like Linux (Ubuntu is quite easy to use for starters).

I would install a verry slim Windows XP Pro 32bit for gaming and maybe burning DVD's (safety-copies) and a Ubuntu 64bit for productive and fun working.
With 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 RAM you should be quite happy. Even under XP that will just use 3.something GB due to 32bit limitations. Linux is also much more ressource efficient.

A 64bit Os will use the whole 4GB. I don't see the need or advantage for/of 8GB over 4GB yet, unless you are running heavy graphics calculations ore massive operations like hughe simulations or compilers ...
Some games will profit from 8GB RAM already but you won't realise a difference to most other games using 4GB just yet. Maybe in a year or so.
Then, you might even switch to a Windows 7 with DirectX 11 maybe (the benchmarks and user reports will show when the time comes) and some more games will take advantage on that. By that time you might already have switched to newer hardware with trippe DDR3 or something.

So, my tip in short:
1.) get 4GB RAM DDR2 (2x2GB) since it's cheap
2.) switch back to a more stable and efficient Windows XP 32bit, using a good 64bit Os (by that I don't count Microsofts products yet)
3.) in time, upgrade further when needed


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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Thu May 21, 2009 4:28 am 
Literally Nine
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Quote:
Quote:
so you're gonna need Vista 64 to see the extra 2gb.
That's not entirely true. You won't need "Vista 64". You will need a 64bit Os though. But there are much better choises than [cough]Vista[/cough].
Quote:
A 64bit Os will use the whole 4GB.
I just talked about this. 32-bit OSes can use more than 4GB if they use the Physical Address Extension (PAE). 64-bit is _not_ a prerequisite.

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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Thu May 21, 2009 4:44 am 
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I don't see the need or advantage for/of 8GB over 4GB yet, unless you are running heavy graphics calculations ore massive operations like hughe simulations or compilers ...
RAM = speed
speed = advantage

The more RAM you have, the less the computer needs to write to the hard disk, which is usually the bottleneck of a computer (unless you have a SSD.... *drools*).

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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Thu May 21, 2009 5:03 am 
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Ok, Tycho is right. I wasn't aware of this PAE technique.
Thanks for the hint. Very interesting. I'll see, whether I can convince my Ubuntu to it.

-> Some infos about PAE on MACs
Quote:
RAM = speed
speed = advantage

The more RAM you have, the less the computer needs to write to the hard disk, which is usually the bottleneck of a computer (unless you have a SSD.... *drools*).
That's just ostensibly the case. If I glance on the progs running on my machine, they use only a fraction of my total RAM and even running a game will not go to the limits (at least, the games I play).

I would compare it to a car: having a bigger fuel tank, can make you go further. But what would you need a 2000 litre tank for (whatever that is in gallons), if your maximum distance you are usually driving is 800 km and your car uses 5 litres per 100 km? There are gas stations every 30 km in average.

So, of course using RAM will minimise the need to read/write from the "slow" magnetic hard drive. But if the maximum amount of data, your programs request is only 2GB, what would you need 200 GB for? It doesn't get faster by not even using 99% of you capacitys.


That's like saying, you need to eat, to survive. Yes, but you woun't need to eat 20kg of food and sugar every day.


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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Thu May 21, 2009 5:09 am 
Literally Nine
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Speaking of the hard disk bottleneck, I should really blog about what I did to fix my mom's computer. I need to reboot into Windows to read the data files though. *sigh*

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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Thu May 21, 2009 5:33 am 
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What did you do, what did you do ????

Blog here, blog here !


Oh, btw. since we have tech savvy nerds (I mean that in a complimenting manner) arround here: Anyone know, what could be wrong with my Soundcard?

I have a Intel core2duo 8400 @ 3 GHz, a Gigabyte EP35-DS4 board, Sparkle GeForce 9800GTX 512 MB and 4GB DDR2-1000 RAM.
Up to recently, I used the onboard Realtech soundchip. But with some surround boxes added, I decided to use a Creative X-Fi Titanium PCI as a soundcard.
But the card wount be recognised. It always says during installation, that no supported product could be found on the machine. I tried the drivers from CD and the latest from Creatives web page. I can't even find the soundcard in Windows among the hardware under System->hardware manager.
I have already tried deaktivating onboard sound in BIOS and deaktivating the Realtech sound drivers in Windows. Still the same results. Also tried all PCIx1 slots. All the same.
Is there something I overlooked? Could I check the hardware with a Knoppix (live Linux)? Or is the soundblaster broken?


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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Thu May 21, 2009 7:57 am 
Literally Nine
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Quote:
What did you do, what did you do ????

Blog here, blog here !
No, I specifically have a blog so I don't blog here. :P

I've scheduled the post to go up in a few hours (hopefully after DNS propagates, since I'm moving Anomalous Anomaly back to a server which can handle being slashdotted), so keep watching. It'll be up soon.
Quote:
Oh, btw. since we have tech savvy nerds (I mean that in a complimenting manner) arround here: Anyone know, what could be wrong with my Soundcard?

I have a Intel core2duo 8400 @ 3 GHz, a Gigabyte EP35-DS4 board, Sparkle GeForce 9800GTX 512 MB and 4GB DDR2-1000 RAM.
Up to recently, I used the onboard Realtech soundchip. But with some surround boxes added, I decided to use a Creative X-Fi Titanium PCI as a soundcard.
But the card wount be recognised. It always says during installation, that no supported product could be found on the machine. I tried the drivers from CD and the latest from Creatives web page. I can't even find the soundcard in Windows among the hardware under System->hardware manager.
I have already tried deaktivating onboard sound in BIOS and deaktivating the Realtech sound drivers in Windows. Still the same results. Also tried all PCIx1 slots. All the same.
Is there something I overlooked? Could I check the hardware with a Knoppix (live Linux)? Or is the soundblaster broken?
Well, drivers match based on the PCI device ID. Can you look at the card in Device Manager (you should be able to even if the driver isn't installed)? If you can get the line which says something akin to: "PCI\VEN_168C&DEV_0024", we can figure out where to get a driver for you.

If it doesn't show in Device Manager at all, then you probably haven't pushed the card in all the way. Try reseating it.

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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Thu May 21, 2009 8:13 am 
 

Joined:Sun Jun 10, 2007 11:41 am
Posts:344
Location:Ninjaville
While I've decided to start monitoring my computers performance when doing games. Most games have all four of my cores running at about 60% where about 98% of my physical memory is being consumed, and I understand what you're saying about upgrading in bits and pieces, however a new computer is $1,000 a 4Gig ram kit (2Gigs + 4 Gigs = 6 Gigs) costs about $37. I'm going to hold off on getting a new graphics card till theres a $135 card in the nvidia 3xx series or the radeon 5xxx series. My Quadcore phenom should give me all the juice I need for awhile, and I have 2 7,200 RPM hard drives that I defragment regularly.


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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Thu May 21, 2009 8:19 am 
Literally Nine
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Quote:
While I've decided to start monitoring my computers performance when doing games. Most games have all four of my cores running at about 60% where about 98% of my physical memory is being consumed, and I understand what you're saying about upgrading in bits and pieces, however a new computer is $1,000 a 4Gig ram kit (2Gigs + 4 Gigs = 6 Gigs) costs about $37. I'm going to hold off on getting a new graphics card till theres a $135 card in the nvidia 3xx series or the radeon 5xxx series. My Quadcore phenom should give me all the juice I need for awhile, and I have 2 7,200 RPM hard drives that I defragment regularly.
Where are you getting the 98% of physical memory statistic? Task Manager? Because if it really is using that much of your physical RAM, that is indeed probably your performance bottleneck. Windows starts paging things out to disk like crazy when you get to that level of memory usage.

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 Post subject:Re: Should I go for six gigs?
PostPosted:Thu May 21, 2009 9:07 am 
 

Joined:Mon May 29, 2006 6:11 pm
Posts:266
Quote:
I'm thinking of getting a new box myself (just gotta bother enough people for the scratch), but I dunno if it's getter to go with an AMD Phenom II X4 Black Box with 4GB of DDR2 or an Intel Core i7 with 12GB of DDR3. Granted, the former is far less expensive than the latter...

And then there's the question of SLi'ing two 9800s or going with a single 260...

-- Griffinhart
You will hate yourself if you choose to sli two 9800s over the 260. Seriously. The 9800 is just an updated 8800 which although a decent card, is getting old now. If you're dropping the cash on something that expensive, a 260 will suit you far better (Or a 280 if you can; I love mine. Like actually love it. If a girl asked me to pick between her and my 280 she'd be out the door in a second)

SLi is far more refined nowadays than it was but there's still lots of problems with it. As for performance between SLi 9800 and a single 260, the performance is pretty much the same but with the single card solution you remove the problems that come with SLi (They don't seem to be determinable; a lot of different random setups experience problems). Plus a decent 260 is about the same price (if not cheaper) than two decent 9800s.
Quote:
First of all, since you have chosen tu run 32bit, I would switch back to Windows XP. Much more efficient in Ressources and more stable and ... Direct X10 / 10.1? Pffff...

And if you really want the graphical gimmics, you could still install a second Os like Linux (Ubuntu is quite easy to use for starters).
You can play games on Linux? I've never dabbled in Linux at all, in fact all I know about it is that it's Open Source and finding drivers is like searching for Atlantis.

Edit for this: I understand what you mean now. Install Vista for games and use Linux as primary.
Quote:
Technically speaking, 32-bit operating systems are _capable_ of using more than 4GB of RAM, through the use of PAE, but I suppose Microsoft wanted to find some sort of selling point for 64-bit Vista, so they crippled the 32-bit version with a 4GB limit.

Switch wrote:
I personally have 8gb in my box although i'm only running 32-bit and still my machine is blisteringly fast.

I hope your OS supports PAE...
According to that wiki page, Vista 32 Home Premium is supported so when I figure out what the hell this PAE thing is and if I can get it working i'll tell you what the performance difference is.


Last edited by Switch on Thu May 21, 2009 2:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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