What to do with 16GB of RAM?

[alizee]

Moderately funny/long story that I won't really share here, but I bought 16GBs of RAM that wasn't compatible with a particular motherboard that I was going to use as a VM server (fails memtest on that machine, passes just fine on my desktop). I didn't really figure it out until after the return date, so I'm just going to put it in my desktop machine.

But, what are some fun/cool things I can do with it? RAM disk, extra swap space or something?

Specs on the desktop are:
Athlon II X4 640 @3.0GHz
Gigabyte 990FX motherboard
Radeon 6850
500GB hard drive (might buy an SSD soon, but spent that budget on one for my MacBook Pro&#8230

Thanks

 

[Gillbot]

sit back and brag about the epeen size of your ram?

(I'm one to talk though)

My main rig has 24gb ram, my play rig has 16gb, my old torrent box has 12gb, my media htpc has 8gb........

Ram is cheap, might as well max em out right?

 

[Red Squirrel]

VMs, lot of VMs.

Or Windows Vista + AVG Antivirus.

 

[Elfear]

Ramdisk. :thumbsup:

 

[Blain]

Moderately funny/long story that I won't really share here, but I bought 16GBs of RAM that wasn't compatible with a particular motherboard that I was going to use as a VM server (fails memtest on that machine, passes just fine on my desktop). I didn't really figure it out until after the return date, so I'm just going to put it in my desktop machine.

But, what are some fun/cool things I can do with it? RAM disk, extra swap space or something?

Specs on the desktop are:
Athlon II X4 640 @3.0GHz
Gigabyte 990FX motherboard
Radeon 6850
500GB hard drive (might buy an SSD soon, but spent that budget on one for my MAcBook Pro…)

Which Linux distro are you running?

 

[Nothinman]

Moderately funny/long story that I won't really share here, but I bought 16GBs of RAM that wasn't compatible with a particular motherboard that I was going to use as a VM server (fails memtest on that machine, passes just fine on my desktop). I didn't really figure it out until after the return date, so I'm just going to put it in my desktop machine.

But, what are some fun/cool things I can do with it? RAM disk, extra swap space or something?

Specs on the desktop are:
Athlon II X4 640 @3.0GHz
Gigabyte 990FX motherboard
Radeon 6850
500GB hard drive (might buy an SSD soon, but spent that budget on one for my MAcBook Pro…)

Thanks

Just use the machine and enjoy the extra performance Win7 gives you with that memory. Stupid hacks like RAM disks are just a huge waste of time....

 

[Coup27]

Stupid hacks like RAM disks are just a huge waste of time....

In normal systems I can't see much point to SRT/SSD caching either. The cost of the drives designed for it is very close to the cost of a mainstream SSD you could use as the OS+apps drive.

 

[Eug]

Heh. That sounds familiar. I basically don't max out the 8 GB RAM in my iMac, but DDR3 is so cheap these days I upgraded it to 12 GB RAM anyway.

I guess we're future proofed... but for what? A zillion virtual machines? Maybe we can start using these computers like mini-computers, with multiple simultaneous users using independent keyboards, mice, and screens?

 

[Nothinman]

Heh. That sounds familiar. I basically don't max out the 8 GB RAM in my iMac, but DDR3 is so cheap these days I upgraded it to 12 GB RAM anyway.

I guess we're future proofed... but for what? A zillion virtual machines? Maybe we can start using these computers like mini-computers, with multiple simultaneous users using independent keyboards, mice, and screens?

It shouldn't be too hard with Linux to setup multiple X servers to handle each set of devices but AFAIK Widows doesn't support multiple local consoles.

 

[alizee]

Thanks for the thoughts! I thought there might be something sweet I didn't really know about, but it seems maybe not… I might play around with a RAM disk, but it probably won't last.