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Some questions about upgrading RAM

D

doodler85

Member
Hey Guys,

I recently added another 1 Gb of memory to my system (Corsair XMS 3200 512x2), and it wasn't the life-changing upgrade that I expected it to be. I'm currently running a Northwood 2.8, 2 gb ram, w/ RAID0 SATA Seagate 160gb HDDs. I never see my system use more than 1 GB at once, and I'm worried that something is not properly configured.

The reason why I upgraded was because I multi-task to unhealthy degrees. My normal application load is:

Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Filezilla, AIM, Winamp, Outlook, Excel, Firefox, the Font Thing

I have noticed that my computer is responding quite nicely, but I have no numbers aside from used physical memory to compare it to my previous configuration. The new memory does show up in CoolMon and Task Manager, but only in two occasions have I managed to use all of 1060 megs.

So... I guess the questions are: Was my RAM upgrade completely pointless in light of my multi-tasking goal? Is it possible that my system is not optimized to function with all of that memory? How can I tweak my system to make the best of its new resources?

Thanks!
 
OK, after some hardcore Photoshop, it spiked to 1467/2047... that's nice to see.

How about the optimization though? Any suggestions for that?
 
There is a difference here. Especially with photoshop, you can have spikes of high ram usage during rendering, without a very high continued use. You'll still be using most of what's available thought.
 
You can't optimise your ram usage if i remember correctly, it's all decided by the OS (at least in XP it is) which is a bit of a pain as XP tends to dump stuff out of RAM even when it's not needed elsewhere.

You are looking at the "peak usage" figure aren't you btw.
 
You won't get a "life changing" experience when increasing RAM above 1GB on any of today's Windows based systems. They are already running about as fast as they are going to run with 1GB. However, you will find that you have a lot more headroom when multitasking. I actually did notice a bit of a usability increase on my PC when going from 1GB PC3200 to 2GB but it was not life changing, as you noted. And it won't be, actually I noted it more than I expected it to. I primarily added the extra 1GB so that it would be there when it was needed. I do a lot of DAW and also run Photoshop CS2 and Macromedia. I can usually run whatever I like at any time with my P4 3.0 and 2GB PC3200. I am going to be building a dedicated DAW rig soon and will install 4GB of ram, more as a way of planning for the future than for any necessity today. I've never come close to using all 2GB of the available ram now, and I've hit it pretty hard. I had gotten fairly close to the 1GB though, up around 800 on heavy loads, which is why I added the extra 1GB for the headroom.
 
Ok, open the task manager and go to performance, look at the "commit charge (K)" box, then look at peak, that's the total RAM used (including virtual RAM if i'm correct, but RAM gets used first.)

Fact is that unless you're using all the RAM you have up adding more doesn't speed your machine up at all. You were starting to when you do hardcore photoshop so it's not a bad buy at all imo.
 
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