4GB vs 8GB

[Fallengod]

Moar power!

 

[janas19]

Moar MS Paint.

 

[CraigRT]

4GB is sufficient for what you need.
I wouldn't say not to go 8 though, its so bloody cheap. I have 8 in my gaming rig and I noticed no difference over 4. But for the price I'm covered for a while on memory at least.

I went DDR3 1333.

 

[jacktesterson]

haha. I keep going back and fourth. I'm just going to stick with 4GB for now. By the time I need 8GB I'll prob upgrade with 16GB and new board, etc anyways

 

[Lotheron]

The question should not be 4GB or 8GB, it should be 8GB or 16GB, especially with a 64Bit system and RAM prices the way they are 🙂

 

[aaksheytalwar]

IMO 8gb ram won't hurt you

You can probably sell your 4gb ram for $10 approx

Look for a deal for around $30-35 for 8gb

So $20-25 to be secure for over a year or nearly two is quite a bargain

 

[meloz]

RAM is so cheap right now you'd best get 8 GB if it is a new build. I did the same when I built my Sandy Bridge box late last year. I have seen RAM usage go over 4 GB only a couple times, but I have also changed the vm.swappiness on my Xubuntu.

Having extra RAM is a very liberating feeling. You might not see a performance improvement in most applications but you will be able to use your PC more freely without worrying if certain programs are holding too much RAM when left open but unused in background.

 

[jacktesterson]

Well, picked up a stick of Kingston 1333 ValuRam 4GB, removed 1 2GB stick....

and now am running 6GB. Met in the middle. Dual channel won't make much difference.

Only 2 memory banks on this cheapie board.

 

[ponyo]

well you already bought so it's too late but now you know it was 100% worthless upgrade. you'll see 0% difference.

 

[Blades]

moar memory for 7z. I always wondered what max dictionary size would do for compression.. and now we know.... not much.

 

[Magic Carpet]

32 GB ram is an absolute waste in most home computing situations.

Is RAM disk a common home application?

I think so and it saves the write cycles on my SSD.

 

[iluvdeal]

Is RAM disk a common home application?

I think so and it saves the write cycles on my SSD.

Which Windows files/folders did you move to the RAM disk? Page file? Windows and browser cache folders? I've been meaning to look into doing that. SSD is already fast so I'd be doing it more to save on the writes as well as the security of the data on the RAM disk being erased on reboots.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Depends on your usage. I keep a small pagefile on my primary partition, purely for troubleshooting purposes. On my RAM disk I put caches, photoshop scratch disk and VM. I use this. One of the best ways to put extra operating memory to use. Speed, common sense and / or security, you decide.

 

[Blades]

http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/

This is a great use of ram. Also can save write cycles, but its best as an aid to mechanical disk(s). The more repetitous file loading, the better.. so obviously.. game loading times are very fast.

 

[jacktesterson]

Yeah, going from 4GB to 6GB I notice nothing, but at least I have a little extra buffer.

Thanks all .

 

[janas19]

http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/

This is a great use of ram. Also can save write cycles, but its best as an aid to mechanical disk(s). The more repetitous file loading, the better.. so obviously.. game loading times are very fast.

I kind of had the same question which they post on the website: why use this when there is a feature integrated into Windows? Too much overhead for me.

 

[NP Complete]

^^ Agree with the whole "ram disk" thing. Tons of research and development has gone into file system development, and part of that includes file "caching" and prefetching. Unless you have a ton of evidence that your file system configuration is bottlenecking your performance (say, perhaps with a database, or perhaps in some rare instances a photoshop scratch disk), you're probably making you system less efficient and slower.

The whole "saving write cycles" is also mostly a fallacy - the OS file system already attempts to minimize writes to improve performance though write-back type caching mechanisms. Of course the OS "obeys" programs that demand immediate writes to disk, because the OS knows that RAM is volitile. RAM disks are once again attempt to short cut a fairly intelligent system.

There are cases where a RAM disk makes sense, but as file systems progress those instances are smaller and smaller.

 

[blazerazor]

Plenty of games out there allow you to mod them to allow access up to 4gb of ram. Whether the game uses 4gb or not is another question, but it does help increase fps in some situations. No reason to not get 8gb when it costs $40 and sometimes drops down to $25.

Where are u buying ram, I'd really like to know. 8gigs is more like 50-90 dollars.

 

[janas19]

Where are u buying ram, I'd really like to know. 8gigs is more like 50-90 dollars.

8GB of DDR3 is $40-50 on Newegg

 

[Blades]

Yeah and then you can do this..

This works much better than native file system write caching..

You can tell the difference.. Its especially effective for the rare scenarios of a comp running x86 with 4GB of ram. It can utilize the memory that windows cannot.. Just saying.. its a good product.

 

[boochi]

More RAM = more virtual machines. Anyone else ever try a XP Virtual Machine running entirely off a RAMDISK? It is fast as shit.

 

[Emulex]

no but i find every with a slow iscsi san/ or nfs nas - if you throw 64gb of ram at sql server with compression on - you get very very very fast throughput even if you are running a pair of 5400rpm sata drives in raid-1 🙂

ram is cheap. 16gb server dimms are now 2x the cost of 8gb dimms which are 2x the cost of 4gb dimms. (nobody wants 1gb/2gb).

Honestly - cheaper to rock RAID-10 with sata drives and throw monstrous amount of ram at the problem than to do the fancy SLC/MLC storage tiering (ZFS).

 

[iluvdeal]

More RAM = more virtual machines. Anyone else ever try a XP Virtual Machine running entirely off a RAMDISK? It is fast as shit.

I thought stuff on RAMDISKs gets wiped clean on reboots which is fine for cache and temp files. How do handle that issue if you are keeping VMs on it?

Given how ridiculously cheap RAM is getting and how it's getting to be like storage where there's more of it than Windows actually needs, I hope developers find new ways to utilize the extra room they have to play with.

 

[Ayah]

the program will usually save the contents of the ramdisk to non-volatile media prior to the computer shutting down

 

[boochi]

I use RamDisk Plus which like Ayah posted allows you to save the ramdisk's contents to disk at shutdown or manually. I also run a 2nd ramdisk for internet cache and windows temp files that does not save at shutdown. The XP from RAMDISK was just an experiment to see if a VM could run faster than the system hosting it. This also works well for small linux installs.