How much ram is too much ram?

[socalcyclist]

Just wondering as I'm looking at Mobo's and one, the ABIT KN8 Ultra Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail - $84.99 supports a maximum of 8GB.

Can one have too much ram?

 

[mazeroth]

RAM is your friend.

Anything over 2gb is pretty much a waste right now.

 

[sniperruff]

no but it'd be a serious waste of money.

 

[czech09]

Originally posted by: mazeroth
RAM is your friend.

Anything over 2gb is pretty much a waste right now.

Correct, unless you're serious about editing, and doing intense multitasking or running a server. If you said no to all of those stick to 2 gigs of memory.

 

[Geomagick]

The motherboard may support 8GB, but you will find it pretty much impossible to populate the board with that much.

2GB is plenty for most applications in the home these days.

 

[imported_rod]

To fit in 8GB, you'd need to find 4x 2GB sticks! 1GB sticks still aren't as fast as 512MB sticks, and 2GB sticks would be worse.

But you can't really have too much RAM - although 32-bit windows can only address about 3.5GB's.

RoD

 

[socalcyclist]

Originally posted by: rod
To fit in 8GB, you'd need to find 4x 2GB sticks! 1GB sticks still aren't as fast as 512MB sticks, and 2GB sticks would be worse.
RoD

So 4 x 512mb would be faster than 2 x 1GB sticks? How much faster, as in niticable performance faster?

Just wondering as I was planning on goin with the 2 x 1Gb sticks in my new setup. Should I consider the 4 x 512mb instead?

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: socalcyclist

Originally posted by: rod
To fit in 8GB, you'd need to find 4x 2GB sticks! 1GB sticks still aren't as fast as 512MB sticks, and 2GB sticks would be worse.
RoD

So 4 x 512mb would be faster than 2 x 1GB sticks? How much faster, as in niticable performance faster?

Just wondering as I was planning on goin with the 2 x 1Gb sticks in my new setup. Should I consider the 4 x 512mb instead?

Other way round, A64s don't like using 4 sticks at the same time as it causes the timings to drop down to 2T. This results in something like a 5% performance hit althought that's a very rough number, some programs don't care some suffer badly.

Best option is 2x1GB.

 

[eastvillager]

You can't have too much ram, but in some cases you can have too many sticks.

If you're going current amd/nf4 stuff, just get two 1 gig sticks with good timings.

If you end up with over 4 gig, check to see if your OS needs any tweaks to recognize and use that much ram.

 

[Centoros]

Stick with 2X1Gig configuration. Anything more you'll start taking performance hits from the memory controller although, its only slight. That's plenty of RAM for what you intend to do.

 

[Tu13erhead]

Yep, 2x1gb is the way to go. I had 3gb for a while (had some extra RAM) and I noticed absolutely no difference in anything.

 

[ta8689]

AHHHH NOOOOOOOOO DONT GET 4x512!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2x1 gig!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111

 

[RallyMaster]

Wow, I never knew my board could handle that much. I always thought it was 4GB. Hmm, not bad. However, you won't need that much RAM...yet. If you do a lot of CAD, you might want around 4GB but then, you would probably be doing it on a workstation board with dual Opterons.

 

[TriggerHappy101]

Take it from the boss....

"Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" -- Bill Gates, 1981

 

[ta8689]

Originally posted by: TriggerHappy101
Take it from the boss....

"Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" -- Bill Gates, 1981

lol... so true. In the computer world, more is always better, as long as more is still fast. There will always need to be more as software requires faster hardware.