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50 Comments
- mshiltonj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7640k of RAM should be enough for anyone.
- rm999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5ram can be very fast - my average-priced ram can transfer 3 THOUSAND gigabytes a second - that means it could transfer my entire harddrive 10 times a second. That tom's hardware article is looking at ram in a harddrive enclosure limited by the SATA interface, which limits transfers to 300 megabytes a second, 10,000 times slower than what RAM is capable of.
If you could keep the OS and often used programs on RAM all the time (using hardware to ensure it doesn't get erased because RAM is volatile) the computer would feel faster than any computer running on harddrives will feel in the next 10 years. This is because harddrives slow down the feel of a computer more than anything else.
As a test of this, reboot your computer, and then open up word or firefox or something (this doesn't work with IE, which is precached). Get a feel for how long it took to open. Then close it, and before doing anything else, open it again. That difference in speed is the difference between something being on the harddrive and being in RAM. - xtracto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@muhgcee:
Kid, there has been something called RAMDISK since the days of MSDOS. If you have an affordable amount of RAM you can try it here:
http://www.cenatek.com/product_ramdisk.cfm - muhgcee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Hmm . . . idea: Give us more RAM slots, lets say 8. And lets say you fill those up. Then let us go into the BIOS and designate "storage" or "memory" for each slot. No more cable speed problem. Customization++
- jeff4379, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4If any of you dreamers out there are running WinXP, think again...max 4GB supported by the OS.
- chris1out, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It won't help anyone unless you are running a 64 bit processor, because 32 bit only uses up to 4 gigs of ram.
- Bigfat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"If any of you dreamers out there are running WinXP, think again...max 4GB supported by the OS."
2.5, actually. I have to use Ubuntu to get all my 4GB used. - Vision77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2True....but it would be nice if we could have these now right??? Can I get a hell yeah...(oops sorry for the Stone Cold shiznit)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"They're not as fast as you might think."
Thats only because of the limited bandwidth of the cable.... - FlyingAvatar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Umm, RAM defragging is complete *****. It's *randomly* *accessed* hence putting it all in order is a won't speed up the speed in which it's accessed. Secondly, modern OSs allocate it in fixed sized chunks so it won't save any RAM by putting them all together either.
Many of these so called RAM defraggers just force all of your running apps to swap to the paging file. Though the amount of free physical RAM goes up, it makes thing SLOWER because they need to get swaped back from disk when you go to use them again. - MrZop, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2plus you'd need a mobo that can handle that much RAM
- conedude13, on 10/12/2007, -0/+28GB stick of RAM is all good and well, but how much would somehting like that cost? Any bets or pools on how much? I'm thinking around 1.5 grand.
- whig, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think we need new motherboards to support the FB-DIMM standard before we can use these.
- Malakin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Quote - "Maybe soon we can have affordable RAM HDD. I saw a demo on The Screensavers once where they had one, and launched Photoshop or Quake from it it or something, ad it was an exponential increase in speed"
They're not as fast as you might think.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/07/can_gigabyte/page10.html - N2EI, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Wasn't the Gates quote something about nobody needing a HD bigger than 20 Megs??? (Still might be a myth though)
And to think I was the King of the Hill when I was the first guy in the area to get the "rare" 512K memory expansion unit for my C128. I carry 2 Gigs on my key chain these days. - Gardenhead, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Woah, if I'm right, this means the new quad G5s can take 64 gigs of ram. Diiiiiesssss.
- Vision77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Who couldn't use one of these. If you say you don't, we all know you are lying!
- soulfire, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Didn't Bill Gates once say no one should ever need more then 640K RAM?
- mathie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Anyone knows the price tag?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Glad to see RAM moving up in the world. Maybe soon we can have affordable RAM HDD. I saw a demo on The Screensavers once where they had one, and launched Photoshop or Quake from it it or something, ad it was an exponential increase in speed. The only drawback of a RAM version of a HDD would be that you lose your data when powering off. How much power would it take to hold the data? Would a small battery be good enough? Just have two battery slots so you can add a fresh one before removing the almost dead one. Or make it charge up while running your computer.
- pankey, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2LMFAO @ 640k RAM
- gandalfar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You do realize that current 32-bit platform can not use more then 4gb of ram and that you need to move to full 64-bit computing to actualy use all this ram?
- tsbardella, on 10/12/2007, -0/+164 bit MS will require more than 4Gigs to do it right. It is like 1994 or so and 8 meg chips came out
- heinousjay, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3@electricalen - "Sad, truly sad, that you have 1GB of ram and are suffering. I have 256M and my PC works great. Get a real OS, or at least clean off all your viruses and spyware slowing down your PC, and get rid of the bloatware."
I take it media manipulation isn't something you do frequently.
Some of us just happen to do things that require large amounts of RAM. Not everyone has your usage patterns. Don't let that stop you from uselessly flaming a discussion, though - we'd hate to lose your valuable input. - mwheeler1982, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"As for using RAM as a harddrive, why? Look at USB thumbdrives, they'd make a far better use.. I don't want to realise "Crap, my batteries died in my PC, all my data is gone"........"
USB thumbdrives have a maximum lifecycle that's WAY WAY shorter than computer RAM. USB thumbdrives have maybe a million write lifetime which wouldn't last very long at all in windows. - gamefoo21, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I got a third party ram defragger. Punches my ram out every 4-5 hours. My machine can bittorrent for weeks and not choke. Also XP does use all 4GB's it just uses I believe .5GB as reserved system space where drivers and all that live. So you'd be looking at 3.5GB when you have 4GB's installed. Think there is a workaround to unlock the extra ram as well. I only run a gig so no problems over here.
- msodrew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@hammerattack: at around 1 GB and running those applications, he's talking about semi simultaneous. I checked the processes thing in xp a few days back.
Photoshop CS2: 90MB
Word 2003: 54MB
Firefox: 249MB (hilariously)
Explorer: 50MB
Other Services: 300MB
So if you sit there, it adds up. Especially if you don't reboot your machine. Although I noticed that WinXP, no matter how much generous RAM you give it, will always manage it poorly. - hammerattack, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I can't imagine 8GB. I finally upgraded from 386 MB of PC133 SDRAM to 1 GB (2 x 512) of PC2300 DDR SDRAM on a dual channel nForce 3 chipset, but my computer wasn't suffering. Now granted, if I spent all day compositing and transcoding, I'd need it, but to say that 1 GB of ram for Photoshop is "suffering" seems a bit of a stretch.
- Shova, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0That 640kbyte thing has been proven a myth, I am pretty sure it is on Snopes somewhere.
About the 8Gigs, of course I would take 4 of those sticks any time.. - decuser, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0What's new about this? Samsung had a press release on this back in June:
http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/PressRelease.asp?seq=20040624_0000059201 - Vision77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0For those who don't have a lot of ram to spare, what about getting a ram defragging app. (Rambooster, Memmonster, Fastdefrag, etc...) Memmonster works pretty good with XP.
- drakeshe, on 02/05/2009, -0/+032GB ramstick
http://digg.com/hardware/Samsung_Opens_Door_To_32G ... - Hattrick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Hmmm, you would think someone who can afford the programs listed in this post could spring for another gig or two of RAM. ;-)
Link Down at 11am EST. - osxmusic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+01 gig of ram should be fine. Do some performance tweaking on your machine.
- ke4roh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0> If you could keep the OS and often used programs on
> RAM all the time (using hardware to ensure it doesn't
> get erased because RAM is volatile) the computer would
> feel faster than any computer running on harddrives
> will feel in the next 10 years.
So true. I had a whole megabyte (!) of RAM in my Apple ][e (it cost $600 IIRC), and I would use it as a ram disk to load in all of Appleworks at once. I rarely turned the thing off because it ran so fast and took several minutes to load from the 5.25" floppy drive. Then again, when I dug my Amiga 3000T out of the closet and turned it on, it seemed mighty snappy compared to today's computers. Booted in like 3 seconds. The only drawback was the 200 MB HD and 16 MB RAM limitations... that and to get the high speed, you had to set the thing up to use a 4-color display --- but really --- who needs 16 billion colors? - Gatorfan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Can't get the link to come up. Gives a mysql error. Who couldn't use 8gig of RAM in their box?
- dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Who couldn't use one of these. If you say you don't, we all know you are lying!" *Puts hand up* My PC wont take more than ~3GB of RAM..
As for having 8GB (or more) RAM for Photoshop/Premire, erm, I think not.. Most high-end 3d workstations rarely have over 2GB, you'd bearly use it..
I have 1GB in this PC, and using it for things like Digital Fusion, I could do with a bit more, espically when when working with particles, as they can take a bit to render, but apart from that, it almost never uses more than a few hundered MB of ram.. But between this PC, and my laptop (512mb), I don't really see that huge a difference..
So, for now, paying for 8GB of ram is utterly pointless.. Wait a year or two, and then it might become less pointless..
Paying, what, $1000? for something you will not use it idiotic, if you need extra perfomace, use the cash and buy a bunch of slower PC's and cluster them
As for using RAM as a harddrive, why? Look at USB thumbdrives, they'd make a far better use.. I don't want to realise "Crap, my batteries died in my PC, all my data is gone"........
Anyway, the story, I might care in a couple of years :P
- Ben
PS, yeh I know for some things having silly ammounts of ram will be usefull, I'm sure HD editing would benifit from not having to force it's self onto a few GB of ram, companys using render farms would hug Samsung when they release it, but for home use this wont be usefull for many a year.. - obscurelyfamous, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Cool article. But who the hell cares what the submitter has in his system?
- monkeyshiner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0its incredible.. but I prefer and wait for a few years.. the cutting edge of technology is always extremely expensive. Remember when 512MB sticks were hundreds of dollars? now they are only $40 give or take.. I might put in 2GB sticks.. its all I need or can use.
- TheBrown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i think its time for me to upgrade... i only 512 MB
- orangetiki, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0You are right gardenhead. Now I just wish for manual memory allocation as in OS 9. Call me old school
- RMuffin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'd freaking kill for one of those...
- tsbardella, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This web site is dugg. Won't come up for me.
- longofest, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Too bad this won't work on my new Quad. It would be nice to brag that I could fit 64GB of RAM in my machine. Still, 16GB ain't bad.
Does anyone actually have a FB-DIMM server/workstation? - Dwebtron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0mysql : erreur a la connexion
- electricalen, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1"it suffers quite a bit with only 1Gb of RAM"
Sad, truly sad, that you have 1GB of ram and are suffering. I have 256M and my PC works great. Get a real OS, or at least clean off all your viruses and spyware slowing down your PC, and get rid of the bloatware. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Alkiver IP: 68.238.52.70 has been banning anyone who edits his warez page! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Cracking_Force
- Vision77, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2163 diggs so far says enough. Hey Lukas88 hate doesn't look good on you. And as for girlfriends, leave yours with me and I'll ram that whore.
- tweeto, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0what the hell is going on, 24 diggs and its on the homepage?!?!!?
- lukas88, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0submitter is a ram whore.
get a girlfriend
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