Is 8GB of RAM overkill?

[crazlunatic]

Hi. I'm planning on moving to 64-bit OS, but still a bit weary since I've seen a few benchmarks and it seems detrimental to SOME 32-bit apps, and the benefit from 64-bit apps does not seem too high. I'm also not doing any transcoding or video editing either.

Anyway back on topic, is 8GB of RAM overkill? Especially when I'm buying DDR2, and planning on a mobo/gfx/cpu upgrade in the next year or so

Currently on 2*1GB crucial ballistix ddr2 800mhz and planning to move to patriot viper 1ghz 2*4GB. They've got this rebate going on where I can get 4GB for 54 Canadian. Thanks.

 

[TC91]

When you say you are upgrading, do you mean a platform change, perhaps with DDR3? If so then just grab 4GB unless you see yourself needing more than that on a regular basis. No need to waste money if you are switching in about a year.

 

[masteryoda34]

When DDR2 is so cheap, I say it may be overkill, but why not do it? It's not going to hurt anything.

 

[sgrinavi]

Originally posted by: masteryoda34
When DDR2 is so cheap, I say it may be overkill, but why not do it? It's not going to hurt anything.

True, but if your goal is pure performance and max O/C then filling up all your slots with RAM will probably have an impact.

 

[masteryoda34]

Originally posted by: sgrinavi

Originally posted by: masteryoda34
When DDR2 is so cheap, I say it may be overkill, but why not do it? It's not going to hurt anything.

True, but if your goal is pure performance and max O/C then filling up all your slots with RAM will probably have an impact.

Yes, but the people who really want pure performance know that. The average user will see more benefit from twice as much ram than from an extra 200MHz memory speed.

 

[soccerballtux]

nope not overkill.

 

[Hacp]

Sure, why not? Get the max you can for your mobo because when DDr3 becomes standard, cheap DDR2 won't exist anymore.

 

[faxon]

when people come in looking for new comps these days at frys i always try and hook them up with 8gb of ram. with 6gb on my e5200 @ 3.2ghz, i cap out at like 5.2gb in the games where my cpu hits 100% load, running other stuff in the backround i dont want to close. when i tried the same scenario on my friend's Q6600 @ 3.2ghz i smashed right into the 6gb wall. well worth it imo if you tend to run a lot of shit at once

 

[taltamir]

i upgraded from 4 gb to 8gb because i was running out. It was a pain to close down programs before running a game

 

[n7]

No.

I don't really feel like arguing with those who believe it's overkill.
If you are happy with 4 GB, great.

But i easily go over 4 GB usage all the time, & i'm not even an extremely heavy multitasker.

 

[crazlunatic]

Just wondering how you guys go over 4GB? That's kind of crazy and I multitask as well. I can easily have about 3-4 word documents open, about 30-40 tabs, sometimes TF2 running in the bg in case I want to quick play, take a break, then play again, and instant messenger, sometimes VM Ware. I still don't use up all my 2GB.

For the most part you guys have convinced me to go 4GB+. Any recommendations? I'm looking at some Patriot RAM since they've got a rebate going on. Looking towards these 1Ghz: http://www.canadacomputers.com...018562&cid=RAM.346.754

Realize that if I have a lot of RAM, I'm not going to have much headroom to OC. I haven't been into the hardware scene for a while so can someone care to explain why? Maybe I'll cap at 6GB.

Another question, will I be able to OC 4GB or 8GB of RAM from 800mhz to 1GhZ. Do chips nowadays use D9s still?

 

[ilkhan]

4x2GB sticks here. Works great.
I got my 4GB kits at different times, but I think it was like $35 and $25 for each kit.

 

[taltamir]

there are many games that take over 2GB of ram by themselves, and if you got some tabs open in say, firefox, ram leakage can make it take a LOT of ram. Then there is windows itself and a variety of background programs...

 

[jimhsu]

When EACH rendering thread in something like After Effects takes up 2 GB and RAM previews eat up something like 100MB/sec .. you will be wondering why you didn't get more. For everyday use? Of course you won't fill it up. But it's there to prevent disk swapping hell when you accidentally do wind up filling your memory so that your system doesn't crash. In that case ... 8GB helps a lot. And there's few things more impressive than swapping between two or three modern full-screen games without writing to HD...

 

[taltamir]

"For everyday use? Of course you won't fill it up"

3GB on chrome and firefox... 2.5GB for some games... 1.3GB for windows vista.

I guess running a game without having to shut down your browsers is not "normal use" anymore...

I am currently using 3.97GB of ram out of 8GB. All I have running is chrome, firefox, sunbird, second copy, eset anti virus, pidgin, utorrent, daemon tools, realvnc, no-ip client, giganews accelerator, drivers, and windows itself.

 

[crazlunatic]

3GB on Chrome and Firefox? There must be something I'm missing out! What about this "overclocking" barrier you guys are talking about?

 

[pjkenned]

Originally posted by: crazlunatic
Just wondering how you guys go over 4GB? That's kind of crazy and I multitask as well. I can easily have about 3-4 word documents open, about 30-40 tabs, sometimes TF2 running in the bg in case I want to quick play, take a break, then play again, and instant messenger, sometimes VM Ware. I still don't use up all my 2GB.

MS Word is actually very easy on memory requirements. Go MS (Have to give credit where credit is due). One thing you will notice with 8GB is that you will use more RAM, because more stuff will be sitting in ram versus a HD swapfile. That's a good thing since even my 8x 15k rpm SAS 2.5" drives in Raid 5 are several times slower than DDR2.

If you do multitask that much, you'll love it.

As for the overclock thing, it depends on lots of things such as chip, board, PSU and etc. More ram = more components = more power to distribute through the motherboard and more signaling. Usually, on a high quality board, it isn't a HUGE issue.

 

[aka1nas]

I've been getting up to around 7GB commit charge with X3:TC running (they made it Large Address Aware with a recent patch). I'll be doing 12GB for sure when I do my I7 build, and I would probably go to 24GB if they had affordable 4GB DDR3 sticks out by then.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: aka1nas
I've been getting up to around 7GB commit charge with X3:TC running (they made it Large Address Aware with a recent patch). I'll be doing 12GB for sure when I do my I7 build, and I would probably go to 24GB if they had affordable 4GB DDR3 sticks out by then.

wow, a game actually willing to USE your damn ram... I mean, if NWN2 used more than 300-600MB of ram it wouldn't be plagued by so many, and so frequent, loading issues.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: crazlunatic
3GB on Chrome and Firefox? There must be something I'm missing out! What about this "overclocking" barrier you guys are talking about?

taltamir is that guy who has hundreds of tabs open at the same time instead of bookmarking things.

Just wondering how you guys go over 4GB? That's kind of crazy and I multitask as well. I can easily have about 3-4 word documents open, about 30-40 tabs, sometimes TF2 running in the bg in case I want to quick play, take a break, then play again, and instant messenger, sometimes VM Ware. I still don't use up all my 2GB.

Vista by itself uses over 1gb of ram. Dedicate about 200mb to file sharing, another 150mb to Folding, 150mb to Firefox (5 tabs open right now), Fallout 3 can use upwards of 1gb of ram (I run games in a window so I can switch back and forth), TF2 is often in the 500-600mb range for me. Right now my other computer is sitting there doing nothing and it's using 1.17gb.

Sure, why not? Get the max you can for your mobo because when DDr3 becomes standard, cheap DDR2 won't exist anymore.

This is not entirely true. Look at the cost of DDR1 memory on Newegg. Look at the 5th one on the list, 512mb of DDR1 for $16. You wouldn't believe how much that crap cost back when I was using a Barton 2500+. You can also buy SDRAM for cheap. I think the last PC133 ram I bought was 256mb and I paid something like $80 for it. Newegg will sell 512mb for only $28.

It doesn't really matter when you buy ram. It doesn't get more expensive as it gets older, but it feels more expensive because the amount you get is not very much compared to newer types. Paying $30 for 512mb of SDRAM is killer deal by year 2000 standards, but it's a major rip off by 2009 standards.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: taltamir

Originally posted by: aka1nas
I've been getting up to around 7GB commit charge with X3:TC running (they made it Large Address Aware with a recent patch). I'll be doing 12GB for sure when I do my I7 build, and I would probably go to 24GB if they had affordable 4GB DDR3 sticks out by then.

wow, a game actually willing to USE your damn ram... I mean, if NWN2 used more than 300-600MB of ram it wouldn't be plagued by so many, and so frequent, loading issues.

+1, one of the reasons I install games (that fit) onto a 5GB ramdrive on my 8GB rig. Sometimes you got to help yourself make an OK situation even better, you can't expect the computers to always be smarter than yourself when it comes to managing resources. Sometimes they are, but for those times in which they are not it helps to have options for stepping in and improving the situation.

Having extra ram in your rig gives you options, you don't have to be using those options 100% all the time in order for the extra ram to be value-add. I don't use my hammer all the time, but when I have a nail that needs pounding boy am I happy to have a hammer available to get the job done.

 

[roid450]

Originally posted by: taltamir
i upgraded from 4 gb to 8gb because i was running out. It was a pain to close down programs before running a game

Exactly why I got the extra 4, and I refuse to use a paging file, I dont want data thats supposed to be in ram go to the much slower HDD

I was running into the "low system resources" windows warning at 3.3Gb while playing Crysis or GTA4 with no paging file. Now with 8 i turn off paging file, and give GTA4 the command to use as much ram as it wants :thumbsup:

 

[taltamir]

taltamir is that guy who has hundreds of tabs open at the same time instead of bookmarking things.

IN ADDITION TO bookmarking things you mean... My online comic links just passed 1800 active comics. I bookmark everything I need and want, but sometimes its nice to have open tabs... a lot of which are things like wikipedia (I click every hyperlink of every word that I don't know, and try to read about the subject.. and then I gotta read more about it because wikipedia is not a reliable source...)
Another issue is that I use sleep mode... I can cut down FF ram usage by a lot simply be restarting it, sleep mode means that ramleaks get to gather over several days.

And ram DOES get more expensive as it gets older. There is a distinct price INCREASE.

Idontcare, what ramdrive program do you use? I wanna try NWN2 on a ramdrive.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: taltamir
Idontcare, what ramdrive program do you use? I wanna try NWN2 on a ramdrive.

http://superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php

If you check it out make sure you are looking at the part of the website which is specific to desktop apps. If you inadvertently wander over to the same named apps but on the server pages you'll get a wee-bit-o sticker shock.

My recommend - try the free 15 day trial, its fully loaded and not castrated in any way. If you find the performance delta worth the license price (which is simply not cheap to put it mildly) then you can get a license and you don't have to uninstall your ramdrive.

Reasons why I specifically like superspeed's ramdrive is (a) the >4GB memory access (I am still on 32bit XP here)...works beautifully with my 8GB of ram, and (b) the auto-save/auto-restore ramdrive backup features make using the ramdrive absolutely seamless with how I use harddrives in the rest of my rig. It's just another harddrive, albeit a tiny 5.25GB one in my case.

Performance is as one would expect for a ramdrive.

 

[taltamir]

thank you... mmm, how odd, they charge 2x the price for 64bit edition.