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103 Comments
- wibblewibble, on 10/12/2007, -14/+71640 KB
- n0xie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+35If you would have read the article...
"For those purposes, I acquired four Ballistix 240-pin DIMM, DDR2 PC2-6400 memory modules (P/N # BL6464AA804) from Crucial Technology. Because this is high-performance module (complete with heat sink), it can be expensive -- upward of $100 per module. You can find equivalents, like Crucial's standard PC2-4200 modules (P/N # CT6464AA53E), for about $40 less per module"
He's using the best of the best of the best. And they (Ballistix) don't come cheap. - Arabani, on 10/12/2007, -1/+25Decent article, although I did have an issue with one statement the author made in the beginning:
"Windows is crafty -- instead of just grinding down to a screeching halt if it looks like memory's coming up short, Windows starts to use your hard disk as if it were memory, polling data to and from the drive as needed."
That's called paging, and all modern operating systems employ that method to create the illusion that there is more physical memory than there really is. It's not as bad as he implies, nor is Windows unique in its use of paging. - eplawless, on 10/12/2007, -3/+23Unfortunately nothing can make your dick any bigger.
- danjal, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22is enough, ever really enough?
- Sukino, on 10/12/2007, -3/+20@eplawless
You don't read your emails, obviously. - noGoodNamesLeft, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18While we're the subject of inflation and changing standards... if you bought memory at the price of an early-1980s Sinclair ZX81 RAMpack (£30 back then for 16KB; £3.43 per KB very roughly adjusted for inflation, and assuming that US $1m = £600,000).....
ONE MILLION DOLLARS would buy you....
170MB of RAM
I don't know if this adds anything to the discussion. I was just curious. :) - doctornkul, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17I would say that you should buy the very worst quality of memory if your budget makes it a stretch to get to 2 GB, a point where in XP you're never going to be paging the disk, unless you do video editing (no games take over a gig, as far as I've seen). The difference between high and low quality memory is huge, especially in overclocking, but even the slowest RAM is several times faster than the fastest disk. If your budget is higher, than buy the highest quality memory that fits it. The numbers might be different for future OSes, but the concept is the same.
- folletto, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Exactly. That's the point.
He's using *extra expensive* RAM, to improve *access times*. This means that, obviously, in a RAM speed test like that, Dual Channel makes the difference and NOT how much RAM you have.
How much you need RAM *isn't* a matter of speed. It's a matter of how much RAM you consume (programs opened, basically).
Since he's speedtesting the RAM, the real added value comes from (1) dual channel (2) ram type (3) ram blocks.
Also, the test should be done not only at least twice (to make averages) but also with different arrangements of ram blocks (is there difference between 1x1 Gb stick or 2x512 Gb sticks? - this matters!).
At this time, this test doesn't mean nothing apart from: buy expensive ram to gain speed and use dual channel to gain speed. Nothing to do with ram sizes. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -8/+20 I demand the sum... OF 1 MILLION DOLLARS
- tvashtar, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15You're right it's outrageous! I mean why would two news sites, which have an overlapping userbase, and overlapping area of interest cover the same story?!? I really think your onto something, I mean look at all these news sites I found covering the same story:
Ahmadinejad Says Iran Won't Yield as UN Atomic Deadline Arrives
Bloomberg - 38 minutes ago
By Marc Wolfensberger. Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran won't bow to international pressure as the ...
Iran defiant ahead of nuclear report
Reuters.uk, UK - 57 minutes ago
By Mark Heinrich. VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran vowed defiantly on Thursday not to bow to Western pressure, hours before a UN watchdog ...
Tehran still as defiant as ever
Turkish Daily News (subscription), Turkey - 52 minutes ago
Iran faces the risk of sanctions after a UN nuclear watchdog report today that is likely to find it has ignored a deadline to halt an atomic fuel program ...
Iranian president stands firm on deadline day
Jerusalem Post, Israel - 44 minutes ago
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stood fast Thursday in maintaining Iran's right to nuclear technology on the day of a UN deadline to roll back on its ...
Iran confident over sanctions
Reuters.uk, UK - 1 hour ago
By Edmund Blair. TEHRAN (Reuters) - If it comes to sanctions, Iran says it can take anything the UN Security Council might impose ...
US, allies prepare to set sanctions on Iran
Boston Globe, United States - 1 hour ago
By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | August 31, 2006. WASHINGTON -- US officials and their European allies are gearing up to impose targeted ...
Ridiculous Eah?
/end sarcasm - ganlet, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14I agree its not how much memory you should have, as much as how much you can afford.
- noGoodNamesLeft, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13I suspect he simply glued the extra gig onto the motherboard inside the case so that it looks impressive under all the glowy UV case-mod lights.
- mcnugget, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11I saw the title and knew someone would say this...
IMHO the answer is we'll never have enough memory, there'll always be something new to take advantage of more RAM. - gzim, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10You do know that for gaming, nothing even uses the full 2 gigs and that with a configuration of more than two sticks of Ram (which you likely have, unless they make 2.5gb sticks now) they will run in 2T command mode, which is drastically slower...so, stop gloating when you have no idea what you are talking about...
- AxeSwinger, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Reminds me of the first computer I bought myself, cost more than my first car. 486 DX no sound card or CD but I had a modem and agonized over getting 2 or 4 megs of ram. I ended up buying 4 because "I would never need any more than that." lol it took me 12 hours to download the DOOM trial.
- gaijintendo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12"512MB of memory (which is actually a more reasonable memory baseline than 64MB) to 2MB"
I hate it when people forget when it is a gig, and meg. - Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8@doctornkul
Civ 4 could easily swallow a gig, if not two when left to its own devices pre-patch :)
dunno if that really *counts* but there you are. - akkuma, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8@doctornkul
"The difference between high and low quality memory is huge, especially in overclocking. . . If your budget is higher, than buy the highest quality memory that fits it. The numbers might be different for future OSes, but the concept is the same."
You're dead wrong on this one. Anandtech did a roundup sometime last year that proved value memory is the best bang for the buck performance and that the difference between non overclocked performance and value ram is nothing worth throwing the extra cash at. Performance ram is only needed when you really attempt to get the most overclocking possible on a stick of ram. You'd be better off spending the extra $100-200+ on a better hard drive/graphics card/cpu - Arabani, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7DDR2 is the next generation of DDR. Simply put, DDR2 is faster than DDR.
- annonimality, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7@digitaldivider,
Read the damn article... He uses benchmarks to show "more memory is only better up to a point -- after which you might as well feed your hard-earned dollars into the paper shredder". Maybe reading is too complex for you. - ghm101, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Not a bad read but it is a very long hand way (3 pages) of delivering only a few facts.
-Dual channel is good.
-If you dont do video editing, image manipulation or Large spreadsheets you 512mb is cool
-Even if you do, not much point getting more than 2GB - theoallardyce, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6So you'd guess from that graph that dual channel 1GB memory is about twice as fast as normal 1GB memory in a real-world application.
***** no! because he didn't ZERO the ***** graph! Having 1GB of dual channel ram in this case is only about 5% faster than having 1GB of normal ram!
Could you attribute a 5% increase to just Windows background processes screwing the timing? Maybe, just about. - webcrumb, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Plus, paging happens anyway, not just when memory is low. In idle time the OS will page less used memory to disk while retaining it in RAM. This way if it's needed again there's no performance hit. If the memory is needed by another process, though, bingo, it's already paged, no performance hit.
- codethief, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Which O/S is that under?
- EdLesMann, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"more memory is only better up to a point -- after which you might as well feed your hard-earned dollars into the paper shredder"
For the average person, I can't agree more. Though I believe that there are plenty of exceptions. My primary Linux system is up all the time and I pretty much have a heavy load on it all of the time. I noticed that I was hitting my memory limits at 1 gig and was hitting the swap on the disk A LOT! So I sprung for the max my motherboard could handle. 4gig. I figured I would use it. After about a month, I realized that I wasnt really ever getting more then 2.5 gig at the peak (and that was rare). I began to wish I had not spent that much on memory....
At least it isnt going to waste (and where the exceptions kick in). I set up several small ram-drive partitions and moved my /tmp to one, my internet cache files to another, a few other I/O directories into a few more, and set aside 1 gig for a torrent download directory. This made a HUGE difference on my drive, speed, and performance. I no longer make tons of read/writes on caching which saved alot of cycles and time, dumping torrents to ram ment way fewer read/writes on my torrents, and now I wish I had more ram to work with to cache other high I/O directories.
If you want to run a ram disk on Linux, you need look no further then /dev/ram* cause I bet you already have it. You may need to tweak it because some distros auto size it into 4mb blocks and others are 96mb blocks. Just lump them together in a partition and your good to go. You may also want to look into tmpfs but beware that tmpfs can and may use your harddisk swap. Sorry windows/mac users, I have no clue how to do ramdrives on other OS's. My guess is you will have to "buy" some program to do this for you. - andrethegiant, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I may be wrong, but considering that his name is andymac1990, i would guess that the "MAJOR GAMING COMP" is a mac, which is... interesting. Most likely a G5, which can support up to 16GBs of ram i believe, unless he bought a new Mac Pro. Also, just speculating, if you're 16 years old (born in 1990) how can you afford 5 gigs of ram??
- shadedream, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6"and you probably need to join the legions of mac simpletons, because pcs are too complex for you."
/sigh was it necessary to bring OS into this? I'd venture to say there are probably many more "simpletons" using Windows as it is currently the mainstream OS and most people without a clue wander into bestbuy or compusa or circuitcity and buy one...
yay for flamers and trolls... - Grimdotdotdot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Yeah. He should have run the tests twice and took an average, at least.
- beplacid, on 10/12/2007, -2/+41GB has been more than enough for me running my AMD64 3000+ on Ubuntu Dapper. And i've been ragging it to ***** - compiling, gaming and leaving it on for days. Even coding in Eclipse is nice and easy with 1GB.
I'd say ultimately, with the release of Vista, you're gonna need 2GB at least - this is how Windows is successful and constantly used; it drives the hardware market.
meh - doctornkul, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Do you realize that the extra gig doesn't do much for gaming (assuming you're playing one game at a time), because the very large majority of games are written for 32 bits and therefore can only use 4 GB?
Also, what kind of hardware do you have? I'm guessing it'd have to be a 64-bit Opteron or Xeon server, because only those have the ability to actually have more than 4 GB memory (enough slots + 64-bit). - Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"640k ought to be enough for anybody" :)
jokes aside, its pointless to pick arbitrary figures since in a year or two chances are you will need more.
a better question to ask would be " how much memory is plenty for now " , in which case i would say a gig is perfectly acceptable - but two gig is better. - TylerDurden0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2That like having too much money or a girlfriend with titties that are too big, too beautiful.
That's right, bitch... - HNIC, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Quick how-to in Windows:
Load up Perfmon and add these two counters:
Memory -> Page/sec
Memory -> Available Mbytes
If you have long periods of low Available Mbytes and high Page/sec at the same time, then you need more memory. - mrbambastik, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Good subject, bad article. One important point the author left behind is "too little memory today hurts more than it did yesterday". Let me explain:
Memory usage has gone up 30-fold over the last 10 years. Yet actual disk throughput has not changed much. When memory usage nears 100% and windows starts paging, it swaps 30x more memory than before to the disk at the same speed as 10 years ago. So it takes 30x more time. All of a sudden the fast computer gets reaaaaal slow.
When will there be an article addressing this very real-life issue, instead of clocking some rendering job noone ever does or cares about, just because it's convenient to the author? - squeekster, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I have to agree with @folleto, this aritcle doesn't answer it's own question. I also don't think much of the author's benchmarking tests, at least they don't seem particularly relevent to me. Do that many people actually spend a significant portion of their working or play time rendering video? I could be wrong of course but if I had to guess not so many compared to software developers for instance.
Memory is for running several to many apps at the same time while maintaining sufficient performance/productivity. At work I'm typically running an IDE, an App Server, XMLSpy, multiple open log files in text editors+baretail, 4-5 firefox windows, Outlook, DBVisualizer, and occasionally Oracle itself if I don't have access to a network installation. Mem usage varies depending on what I'm doing of course but I often find myself wishing for more RAM than my current 2 gigs. - noGoodNamesLeft, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2My laptop has 128MB, which is supposedly enough to run Windows XP effectively, and twice the absolute minimum. Now, maybe it's the stuff that gets loaded at startup, but....
It thrashes *horribly* and verges on unusable at times. I'd probably agree with you that you need *much* more, even just to run XP.
The nice irony is that I'd happily slap in a half-gig, or even 256MB of RAM to get it to work better, but because it's such an old machine, any memory upgrade would cost around £100/$180 (supply and demand; old machine, old-style memory which is a niche now).
Annoying, because I know it's a potentially usable machine, but it's the old argument about upgrading any machine that's over 4-5 years old. Whilst spending the money would still be cheaper than a new machine, the rest of it would still be old.... it's kind of annoying though. - tlink211, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I see so many computers with 256MB, which got them off the shelf in 2002, but its paging the hard drive to death. 256MB RAM + 5400RPM HDD = Sore A$$...
Anyway, I recently added a humble 128MB to one of these. That made a worthwhile improvement and it only added $25.00 to the bill, $35.00 if it had been new.
Bottom line, the customer got it home, it ran better than when it was new and the price was right.
When the hard drive takes a powder, and it will, I'll replace it with a 7200RPM unit, upgrade the RAM to 512MB and they can enjoy the performance they should have started out with in '02. - namhuy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4what is different between DDR and DDR2 ???
which one is better ? - Paul, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"2MB, which is half the maximum memory most consumer motherboards support"
Really? That is informative! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@ DigDugDigger
You are a BRAVE BRAVE man, putting your junk in such fiery peril all for the sake of participating on digg. I salute you. - hardedge, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Just to set everybody's mind at ease, OSMark runs 3 iterations of its "official test" before coming up with a score and I ran three iterations of the video rendering test (think of the hours!) and used the middle number of the three.
As well, for those of you concerned about my using "speed" memory, please remember that memory is only as fast as the bus its used on, not the speed of the memory installed on it. (Same way a car gets absooutely no benefit from hi-test if it was designed to run on regular.)
The only reason I used the Ballistix memory was because I needed 2GB for some Core 2 Duo Extreme overclocking tests in a different computer for a different story and wasn't going to pony up the cash for both that and some vanilla sticks for this. (Yes, reviewers do really pay for some things.) Don't get hung up on memory type here, It's just a red herring if you do.
MaxKelley, have the courtesy to read the piece before commenting. I'm talking about a Windows environment. It's written there in black and white. It's great if you want to promote a version of Linux (I run a Linux site at technudgelive/linux) but don't make yourself look ignorant with a comment that's so.out of context.
Nanocaiordo, you hit the memory nail on the head. As I mentioned in the article, my Thinkpad 600 chugs along quite properly with its 64MB and the tasks it's set to do. - DigDugDigger, on 10/12/2007, -6/+7Getting my comments dugg seems to do the trick, but then again my Macbook Pro is kinda warm sitting on my lap...
- golddigga, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1you can never have enough ram. if you think you'll be ok getting the stock 512mbs in a new computer, you're gonna regret it. get as much as you can get
- puntloos, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I don't like this article for one simple reason. It is exaggerating stuff and futzing with graphs.
Specifically, if you look at the graph, the difference between dual channel and single channel seems STAGGERING.. wow, that bar is almost twice as high!!
And then you look at the actual figures. DC index: 2090, SC: 1905.. barely 10%, best case scenario. And that is ONLY if you are using an application where the bottleneck is memory. For most actual office applications that don't need to move HUGE blobs of data around, the effect is IMHO negligible compared to the difference of spending (say) $100 extra on a 10,000rpm drive. - BWhaler, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I think for the Mac, 1 gig is perfect. If you are doing a lot with Adobe apps, then 2 gig is better. Pro's need 4 gigs.
But most folks will enjoy 1 gig just fine. - nanocaiordo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0you probably mean 4GB ... by the way the limit of 4GB does not come from the mobo it self but from Operative Systems. 32bit OSs support up to 4GB of ram when 64bit OSs can support i believe up to 16GB of memory.
- OopsIDied, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0If a exact specification were needed, id have to say 2 gigs. Right now, there are many demanding programs out there, like battlefield 2, call of duty 2, etc. And if your not a gamer,you might need even more. For example, you might be processing a video, which for me sometimes takes 30 minutes for about 5 minutes with 512 Mb, but u might also be trying to search the Internet for a product and email your boss at the same time. So this basically would require 1GB to be efficient. But also, I'm guessing in about 1 year, programs will need much more memory then right now and memory will be cheaper. So 2GB it is.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Noooooo...
We want more memory...More! - 15charmaxwtf, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2You just need as much as your going to use...not that difficult, or have I missed something?
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