Author Topic: Alright you hardware smarties (Bloom & Skuzzy look here) (Read 2251 times)

Skuzzy · « **Reply #15 on:** December 06, 2003, 09:25:38 AM »

mold, you are a very rare exception then. I do video and sound editing as a hobby, which is incredibly memory intensive, and there is no difference in performance between 512MB ad 1GB of memory.
512MB should be more than enough ram for 99.9% of the people out there.

bloom25 · « **Reply #16 on:** December 06, 2003, 11:25:24 AM »

If you have Win2k/XP you can see how much memory is being used by clicking the performance tab from task manager. (Hit ctrl-alt-delete once and click task manager.) Look under "physical memory." I have done some very serious CAD work and never once needed more than 512 MB. Considering 512 MB costs around $100, there are a lot better things that $100 could be spent on than an extra 512 MB of ram which will have no performance benefits for most people.

mold · « **Reply #17 on:** December 06, 2003, 01:04:59 PM »

Perhaps. I find that the extra memory benefits me when I am doing more than one thing at once. Like a video encode and a couple other things in the background, then when I try to browse the web it swaps and crawls with 512. Faster with a gig.

As far as price, you can get a gig for $110-$120 (see link I posted above). 512 is prolly half that much. So it's a difference of $50-$60, which may or may not be worth it. Depends on what you are doing with it, again. For games only, maybe not.

zmeg · « **Reply #18 on:** December 06, 2003, 01:36:30 PM »

Bloom or Skuzzy, can you use a ramdrive as a swop file and gain performance in XP Pro?

bloom25 · « **Reply #19 on:** December 07, 2003, 01:58:18 AM »

I believe there are 3rd party programs out there zmeg to setup ramdisks, but I can see how using them might not always help performance. You would also need a TON of physical memory to put the swap file totally in RAM if you plan on running a lot of programs, which is where you would see the biggest benefits of such a scheme. There's also the potential limitation of Windows XP and 32bit addressing itself, which limits addressable memory to 4 GB, but more importantly the 2GB OS/2GB application limit of Windows.

mold · « **Reply #20 on:** December 07, 2003, 08:44:20 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by zmeg
Bloom or Skuzzy, can you use a ramdrive as a swop file and gain performance in XP Pro?

Don't think there's any point in that. If the RAM is there, the kernel will use it anyway and minimize page swaps to disk.

zmeg · « **Reply #21 on:** December 07, 2003, 09:51:40 AM »

Thanks guys, tht pretty much answers my question.

Animal · « **Reply #22 on:** December 07, 2003, 11:51:39 AM »

I dont think 256mb is enough. It may be enough for Aces High, not if you play games like Raven Shield, IL2, LOMAC, Mac Payne 2, Homeworld 2.

Minimum 512 of very fast DDR. And you want 1GB.