4GB vs 8GB vs 12GB RAM?

I am just curious, what would 8GB or 12GB of RAM allow me to do that I currently cannot do with 4GB of RAM? My current setup has 2x2GB RAM in dual-channel, but I got 2 more slots for RAM. So, what would happen if I plugged in 2x2GB more memory (total 8GB)? What would happen if I buy 2x4GB RAM, plug it into the dual-channel slots, then move my 2x2GB RAM into the spare slots (total 10GB)?

Just wondering...

Well, assuming you're running 64 bits, it'll allow you to run whatever it is you're running twice, three, four times. Because very few single programs actually so much RAM, it just lets you have more of it loaded at once.

If you do a lot of photoshopping or other image editing, it might be worth seeing your memory usage to see whether having that loaded and anything else (browsers, email) at the same time run you out of memory or come close.

More memory will NOT make your computer run faster UNLESS you were previously running out of it. It might give a "nice feeling" that you have 8, 10, 16GB of RAM, but to be honest you'd just be wasting your money. Save the money for when you need it for a more critical update, like a new system/video card.

Of course I'm running 64-bits... even at 4GB with a 1GB video RAM, 64-bitty goodness is a must.

So... are you saying it'll just affect loading times? I don't do much Photoshop except for cropping pictures so that's not an issue for me. Wasn't there something about a guy with 12GB RAM having his OS loaded onto RAM and makes programs run faster? Admittedly, those are "programs" and not necessarily "games"...

A few weeks back, I went from a Phenom II X4 965 with 4GB DDR2 at 800 speed to a Phenom II X6 1090T with 8GB DDR3 at 1333 speed.

So, 50 percent more cores, twice as much memory, and the memory ran 67 percent FASTER.

Game and benchmark FPS performance change when Phenoms clocked the same (drum roll): NONE (within measurement errors -- certainly nothing visible).

FWIW

If your not going to run a high end server or render a lot of video, then 4,6 or 8 (depending on dual or triple channel) would more than suffice for gaming. It'll help to cut down on fetching primarily scenery files.

The other reason for having more ram is to be able to use a virtual ram drive, loading and running apps "directly"** from system ram, please note ** the quotes.

The software to do so now becomes critical as does the type of application you're going to be running. How the software uses or enables dynamic ram, real-time updates, file systems (Fat16/32 or NTFS), the cluster sizes offered and image compression become critical if you're going to be running some kind of campaign sim.

Now the physical amount of ram comes into play. Most free ramdisk software will have 4gb total access. That's including ram used to run resources. The balance is the used for the app. The paring down of resources or services can become an issue in a 4gb ramdrive, especially with some of today's monster video cards.

Most server ramdisk software will access at least a minimum of 128gb and can go as high as 2tb! Most will support up to 128 virtual drives when mirroring drive numbers.

I currently run a ramdisk that accesses 8gb of system ram. If I run the services really "lean", I have up to 6.5gb to use for the app.

A ramdrive will not necessarily increase the often misuse of fps as a measure of "true" performance (MHO), but it can totally eliminate micro stutters or slowing down during highly populated scenery. To say the app now loads faster is an understatement.

Sims like FSX and X-Plane 9 would require a whole lot of system ram; a freaking boatload of it in order to "dump" the whole app into rd. ARAM and OFF could be done with 12gb IF you were to use a scalpel as to what was being loaded and not run a dynamic capmaign. The "best bang for the buck" is between 16/32gb for sims that have huge dynamic campaigns.

Some of the sims I run in a ramdrive are CFS3 along with ETO, PTO and KTCS, IL-2:1946, Pacific Fighters, Wings of Prey. I'm using ProcMon to evalute OFF, FSX, X-Plane and RoF to see how "practical" they'd be. FSX and X-Plane would be very tedious to dissect and run. This would almost boil down to having to set up each individual plane with each type of scenery file you would would fly in. Whew!

As a footnote, I'm waiting for W7_64 to "mature" some more before I start to seriously look at SSD's.

plug_nickel

It's funny how RAMdrives are coming up again; I remember using those back in the 8086 days for some reason or another...

If you know how to set up an OS to load into and then run off a RAM-drive, then yes, anything involving system loads will run pretty damned quick. This might be a world of hurt getting it to work on a windows system though. I've personally never done it, so I can't help there.

As almccoyjr mentioned you could also use a program to get games to run in a RAM-drive. Problem then is that this would also involve a lot of additional setup because they aren't designed to be run in such a fashion, requiring a program to handle and redirect loading calls. End result is that initial loading times will be the same or longer (you still have to load all of the data into the ram, requiring a long HD read) but you probably won't get stutter when in game because instead of data loads requiring HD access, they are now streamed from RAM which is orders of magnitude quicker.

To reiterate what almccoyjr said, loading from RAM won't increase FPS. It may increase initial loading times, but will reduce stutter caused by data loads (X-plane reading scenery is a good example of such data loads).

The other problem with using a ram-drive for games is that you'd need quite a lot more RAM - probably somewhere in the region of 8-16GB depending on the game's footprint on the HD and maximum dynamic RAM requirements.

@Allen:
You mentioned that you went from DDR2 to DDR3 - bus speeds went up, but what about CAS latencies? (I'm also guessing that the GPU is the same).
I don't suppose you've looked at how much faster you can calculate Pi to a million significant figures?

Ah, I could always depend on Allen for practical information. Cheers!

almccoyjr and Gopher, you guys realize I'm no computer programmer, yes? I have to do a lot of reading just to understand half the posts here. Lol! Anyway, thanks for your replies. The gist of what I absorbed was that it isn't worth the effort to do this RAMdrive at my current "hobby" level.

I guess my question was more of: will the extra RAM overhead (8 or 12 vs 4) improve performance, whether FPS or load times? I never thought RAM would affect framerates, I know GPUs do that, but I'm glad to see that load times wouldn't significantly improve.

Oh well... I'll be gunning for more screens and maybe a videocard upgrade then!

Some boards don't like all slots populated. The older 680i, 780i 775 socket boards would not OC well with all slots populated. Some boards will only run dual channel with two slots populated and some will run dual channel with all four, but the memory has to be the same size. I imagine there are some Intel boards that can run whatever you put in them.

I don't think it would be worth it myself. They had my memory on sale the other day for 89 bucks with 15% off so I think if you insist on getting more memory, get a couple of 4Gb sticks and sell your old memory. IMHO.

FYI, my system idles at around 2100Mb of RAM used. So you can see that having more than 4Gb with Win 7 64 is preferable since Win 7 64 likes to eat RAM.

I remember working on a brother and sisters identical Gateway computers a few years ago. They had Vista 32, P4 3.4Ghz procs and should have been pretty fast as the dual core rage had not set in yet. They said they were so slow they were painful and the reason was they had 512Mb of memory. I put in 2 1Gb sticks in each computer and that solved the problem for good.

I guess when Win 8 come out 8Gb will seem puny.

Actually, you money would be best spent on a video card I think.

Also, from the way I understand it, if you have 4Gb of RAM, and a 1Gb video card on a 32 bit system, the video card takes precedence. In other words, of the 3.5 or 4Gb total the system can use, the video card comes first, then the RAM, so effectively, you would only be able to use around 3Gb of the 4Gb you have because of the video card. Does that make sense?

Good points. There is a big difference in the developmental history of vrd's from the 8086 period to now. Significant progress was made when W2K PRO hit the scene due to the way the OS could now treat cpu's.

Yes, you're still loading the the rd image into a vrd from the hd, but the "how the software addresses" various functions in my post negates the majority of the load time issues and greatly minimizes them in some apps. Once the image is loaded into system ram, the results are often quite phenomenal. Faster than a SSD. FE1 is a good example. It has the most ill conceived, poorly written, executed load/run sequence I've ever experienced. Mig Alley was number 1 until FE1 cam along. "Dumping" the program into an uncompressed image, using Fat32, 512k cluster dramatically speeds up the load/run process. The "handling of load calls" is accomplished IF the whole app is imaged and loaded. Removing docs or video not used directly in game also will speed up the process. Running compression can be very tricky and can result into turning the vrd into a eide drive at 5400rpm.

An app loaded into a vrd will perform just as poorly when proper game cfg's aren't setup. You'll just be able to launch a crappy running app faster. I look at the time to get a sim's cfg setup and the vrd setup as ground crew maintenance and pre-flight mission briefing. Once done, imaged and save for future use.

The primary kicker to a vrd is the amount of system ram, it's cost/gb ratio, supporting mobo and the size of the application. The more you can "dump", the more complete the sim experience will be. I've seen Crucial 24gb (6x4) 1666 triple non-ecc for under $300.

One thing I failed to mention is how the software uses multi core cpu's. Those that I've looked at, professional or server versions, handle dual and many are configurable for quad. I don't how they would work with the newer hexa/octa core cpu's.

In a Max PC issue they did a very in depth analysis of dual/triple channel, speed to cas workup. The direction of the article was towards speed over cas depending on the chipset.

plug_nickel

Any new upper midrange or high end system should have 6 or 8 GB of RAM. It's so cheap now there's really no excuse - 8GB of quality DDR3 can be had for less than $100. Yeah, you can get by ok with 4 GB, but having more will allow the OS to do more caching and so on to increase your overall system responsiveness.

RAM drives, OTOH, are kinda silly/pointless to me. Most normal motherboards only support 24 or 32 GB of RAM. I'm not sure you could realistically even fit 32 GB of memory in a normal desktop system at the moment - the largest memory kits I can find on Newegg are 24 GB, and they use all 6 slots in a triple channel system. Even assuming you could fit 32 GB, most games today are so large that you'll only fit maybe 2-3 games on your RAM drive if you're leaving 6-8 GB for the system. And to get even 24 GB of quality RAM you're looking at spending $400-500. If you have that much to spend, drop $100 on 8 GB of RAM and the other $300-400 on a SSD (you'll get roughly 160-250GB, depending on what you buy).

A lot of mainstream boards like mine only support 4Gb sticks per slot anyway. I guess some uber high end boards can run an 8Gb stick of memory.

The "final" method is to load an image stored in a vrd which is in the ssd into system ram.

Better yet, take some flying lessons. The experience of actually flying the real thing just can't be beat.

For me, the real upside to using this type of software is the research done while traveling that highway. I've learned more about my systems components, components in general, software execution, and some of the performance "myths" and marketing hype that populate the landscape.

I'm better able to see the forest and the trees. That's why I didn't jump on bandwagon when the 680i-sli first came out in '06. I waited for the first revision and built my current system in 12/06. The mobo still has some issues if really pressed to hard, but I know exactly what and where they are.

You don't use the ram drives for storage, as they're still volatile. You can just load some parts of the game you want to play on the ram drive before starting it. And it's much much faster than any ssd, whatever the price. Right now, creating a ram drive is the only reason I can think to buy more than 3-4 GB memory. And other than most flight simulators, and Arma II due to the way it's caching the objects and textures, there aren't many games that get a significant boost in performance from them.

Also, there was a rumor that the high end Sandy Bridge motherboards, with the LGA 2011, would support quad channel memory, which would mean 8 slots for memory. Don't know if this is going to happen, and most processors and motherboards supported by the 2011 will be targeted to the server market.

For those of you with 6GB and 8GB of memory, how much RAM will Windows 7 cache for you? It seems that the optimal amount of RAM would be as much as it takes to run your programs without Windows having to free up whatever it has reserved for the cache. When I ran 2x2GB + 1x2GB in W7RC, I distinctly chomping up more cache.

I recently upgraded to 8gb on my Q9550 box from 4gb. I upgraded because the original memory I bought for the box years ago was on sale so I grabbed 2 more sticks
Available - 6gb
Cache - 2gb

Upgrade made little difference in performance.

I'm looking to go the 12GB to 16GB memory range, and intend to set up Windows 7 64-bit to use a RAM drive for my pagefile and Adobe scratch space.

From what I've read it should speed up responsiveness, especially with video cards with lots of memory.

I realize that may soound odd, and some would suggest I not run a pagefile at all (Even if I have the memory overhead) but some apps/games don't like not having a pagefile set!

Exactly

With AMD, latency is the primary memory issue, I have read. My latencies went from 5 CAS @ 800 to 9 CAS @1333. Hence, my absolute latency increased -- by roughly 8 percent -- assuming the ratios are a rough measure of absolute latency Still, that didn't make things slower -- they stayed the same overall in games and game benchmarks when the CPUs were clocked the same.

Yes, same GPU setup.

No doubt, there will be some applications and non-game benchmarks helped by extra cores and more/faster memory -- and, I got those improvements in those situations that I checked. And, there must be at least one exception to the rule for games

But, for those looking for the best gaming rig "for the money", memory is not a place to dump a lot of cash. 4GB for $50 is enough to run games in the normal way. And, since 8GB only costs about $100 on sale, why not? But, one won't see a difference, I think. That may change as games are developed in the future -- however, most games now are console ports or closely related to console games; thus, requirements for most games are easily met by a "normal" computer system. Just my opinion

Right. For some reason I was thinking about the addin RAM drive cards that have a built in battery instead of creating one from system RAM.

I still don't really see the point. Very few games are really worth even putting on a SSD because very few games touch the hard drive that much after the initial load screen. While the RAM drive is faster than a SSD, the only real benefit is a few seconds on the loading screen... not worth the cost/trouble to me.



Page file on a RAM drive is utterly and completely pointless. Set it to a small fixed size on your hard drive and don't worry about it. Adobe's scratch file OTOH might be worthwhile if you're a heavy PS user.

I do both, lots of Adobe CS5 and some movie editing. Also, I did some tests at my work (Since my machines there have a ton more memory) and setting the pagefile to a RAM drive greatly increased smoothness of gameplay in some hard drive caching intensive games (More on the fly caching, not level loading caching).

Windows bootimes increased a small bit as well (Timed with a stop watch).

I don't trust SSDs yet, so I refuse to go that route... Instead I have my OS and apps on a dual CPU 600GB 10000 RPM Velociraptor hard drive and my games on a dual CPU 1TB 7200 RPM Caviar Black drive.

Which game?

The two I tested were Rise of Flight and DCS Blackshark. I've read the latest Grand Theft Auto IV game also shows some improvement but I don't own that one to test with.

My biggest reason going this route though is for Adobe CS, and for when my graphics card memory runs out and spills over to physical RAM and then to the swap file... Right now I'm only running 4GB at home, I hope to go up to 12GB or 16GB by tax return season.

I don't have those two to test with specifically, but I strongly suspect a case of either placebo, or "correlation doesn't equal causation".

I do, however, have GTA4 to test. I fired it up and spent about 20 minutes running around while watching pagefile activity via Process Monitor. There isn't any. At all. Perhaps a half dozen reads from other processes when the game started, and another half dozen when it shut down.

Hi, I have MSI Afterburner which can Monitor the RAM used by the Vid card ingame.. Is there such a Program for Memory usage and display ingame real time??

I have seen Arma2:OA Go as high as 1260mb ingame..pushing the boundries of my 1280mb card!! hehe

More than 4 GB is not necessary for sims or games right now. But I know of two sim developers who are considering making 6 GB the recommended RAM for their new products. No, I can't say who. Maybe they'll decide 4 GB is enough.

If you're building a new computer, go with 6 or 8 depending on the mobo config. As others have said, with the current price of RAM, why not.

If you do PhotoShop (or any other big image editing program), video editing, or 3D image creation (3D Max), you can't have enough RAM.

Very interesting tests folks. Thanks for sharing the results.



Sure, MSI Afterburner can do that. If you open the settings and go to the monitoring tab, you can select what graphs you want to see. Once you check the one you want to turn it on (in this case memory usage), select it in the scroll list and check the box below that says "Show in OSD". You can check this box for each graph. Then you turn the OSD on with the included RivaTuner server app.

I'm also experimenting with some ARMA2 vram usage settings. Some have claimed increasing the system memory to 8GB from the typical 4GB helps a ton. In this case, I'd say this could possibly be true since ARMA 2 is an insatiable resource hog (as you pointed out) and W7 can borrow system memory for use by the graphics system as I understand it.

@ Phoenix, I thought the Ram MSI AB Monitored was the vRAM not the system memory?? I would like to monitor the System memory ingame..

Process Explorer or the Win7 Resource Monitor both will.



Yes. If you look at the system details you'll see figures for dedicated graphics memory and shared system memory under the graphics section. For me it's 2048 MB dedicated, 3067 MB shared. It's one of those things though that you want to avoid when possible. Transfers from system memory to GPU memory are much faster than say, accessing a page file on the hard drive, but it's still significantly slower than simply keeping everything in GPU memory.

Please remember that a 32Bit programme on a 64Bit OS will still be limited to allocating a maximum of 2GB for itself on the system memory.

I've no idea how much a 64Bit exe could address in theory, but remember that a 48Bit address space would be 256 TerraByte (85 times the size of the available 3TB HD's). So Win7 Home Premium users could run 64Bit programmes that could fill their 16GB memory limit and Win7 Professional users could in theory fill the 192GB memory limit.

Now how large an area would be possibly be populated and textured in FSX, if all texture and models would reside in 190GB memory (and have no disk access stutter)?

Process Explorer or the Win7 Resource Monitor both will.


Hi, I want the Amount of System RAM used to be Displayed inGame.. I do NOT see such and option on Resource monitor.. I do NOT want to run the game then ALT Tab out to see resource monitor??

I don't know off hand of anything capable of that.



Unless it was linked with the largeaddressaware flag, then it can address a full 4GB.



2^64 bytes, which is 16 EB (exabytes) or 17,179,869,184 GB.

Off the top of my head, Arma II. And most simulators that have big scenes. Of course, both of the big civilian ones can't be loaded in a ram drive due to the sheer volume of data they have.

Apologies dude, wasn't reading carefully enough. I don't know of anything that will do that, but maybe you could run ARMA in windowed mode so you can keep the resource monitor visible - but that might change your results some =/

Excuse me if I don't take that as being the truth, but just the theoretical limit. As the memory limit in Windows7 (professional and higher) is 192GB, the memory limit for an exe running under it will either be 192GB or lower.

That is the limit determined by hardware. What the OS does is its own business. If I want to I can write a 64 bit OS where executables are limited to 1 MB of memory. The current limit on Windows 7 x64 is 8 TB IIRC.

This has now been said a few times in this thread, to clarify: Unless you run specific 64bit software for those tasks, will more RAM even help? For example the Photoshop "Lite" many people get with their cameras and use are 32bit apps limited to max 2GB, maybe 3GB RAM. You'd need professional products (with prices to match)... to see a difference no?

Short answer: Maybe (probably).

Long answer: It depends on exactly how Adobe set up Photoshop Lite. If they didn't set the LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag when creating the exe, then it's flat-out limited addressing only 2GB memory. If they did set the flag, then even if the exe is 32 bit it could address up to 4GB of memory under win64. Assuming, that is, that the "lite" version uses allocators and algorithms that are able to take advantage of >2GB of memory. I'd say that it probably does, since I doubt it's worth the effort for Adobe to make such a significant change.

I thought LAA flag meant max. 3GB for the application, 2GB without LAA?

By this reasoning I always held that if basic system processes fit inside 1GB (easy in Win7), you are well off with 4GB as long as you are not running specialized 64bit applications. Though a 64bit OS still makes sense to avoid the "management limits" if you also have large VRAM.

If LAA means 4GB max, then 6GB systems would make more sense for more people.

Under 32 bit windows (any version), yes. 2GB for any process, 2GB for the kernel. If you boot with the /3GB switch in boot.ini (you shouldn't) then a process with LAA can address up to 3GB, but the kernel is limited to 1GB.

Under 64 bit windows, a process without LAA is limited to 2GB, same as 32 bit. A process with LAA however can address the full 4GB of the 32 bit address space.



Honestly I would expect that any program with real need to address >2GB of memory would (should) have a 64 bit version. Just flipping on LAA doesn't do much. The program has to be design to actually allocate and use the extra memory to see a real benefit from it.

Take Oblivion for example. With all the hi-res texture packs and so on available for it it's pretty easy to run into problems with the game running out of memory and crashing when it hits the 2GB barrier. You can modify the game's exe to enable the LAA flag, and doing so will save you from some of the crashes. However, the game will never really use more than 2GB, because it wasn't built to make use of more memory.

Hi, I had added a Memory stick for some added RAM w/Readyboost feature. Is there anywhere I can see the added RAM?? I went into system and it does NOT show the extra 2 gb??

Was just doing an experiment for now will probally add some Real memory ltr..

I recently went from 4GB>8GB on Win7 64bit and can't say I noticed much benefit. I'm sure I am getting some benefit, just can't say it is all that noticeable so I wouldn't sweat it if money is tight.

Also, read the below article. It quite clearly states that unless a game is 64bit native it can't see anymore than 2GB of ram available to it. That explains why I see little benefit by going to 8GB of ram because in just about all games it makes no dif if you have 4GB or 8GB, it will still only be able to use 2GB max.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/405282