Patriot: 16GB is the new 8GB for Sandy Bridge-E
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 1, 2011 3:04 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- Memory
- Sandy Bridge
- Patriot
- Computex 2011
Patriot gave me a preview of their new Viper Xtreme Division4 DDR3 memory due out later this year. Patriot is targeting this new line at Sandy Bridge E systems, which support up to four channels of DDR3 memory (official support for DDR3-1600, but overclocking will surely be an option).
Given the current price of memory, Patriot expects the default configuration for SNB-E systems to be a kit of four 4GB DIMMs for a total of 16GB. Sandy Bridge E isn't expected until the Fall at the earliest so memory pricing isn't certain, but Patriot expects a 16GB SNB-E memory kit to sell for around $130 when Division4 is released later this year.
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dananski - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
It's always sad when people throw money at something they don't understand. But that said, those of us who do understand can usually find a use for insane amounts of RAM. And the more available it is the more developers will take advantage of it in new games and other applications.keitaro - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
average? Whoever is going to run the Sandy Bridge E platform is not going to be average by any means. What is someone going to do with 16GB of RAM? Let's see...Run Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Opera at the same time, Trillian/Digsby/Pidgin, Xfire, Steam, mIRC/Xchat, uTorrent, Winamp/iTunes/Foobar, various desktop applets like time, weather, system info, and so forth.
And if we want to go farther, we could add in Illustrator + Photoshop into the mix, along with maybe Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, or Paint.NET.
djgandy - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
16GB to run some browsers, IM clients and some music? This is your definition of a non average user? That sounds pretty average to me, well within the capabilities of any laptop on the market in the past couple of years.Even with Photoshop thrown in unless you are some major image pro 16GB is a lot of memory.
Klinky1984 - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
Firefox w/ 20 - 30 tabs open & opera + chrome for debugging w/ their JS debuggers running or HTML inspection tools open could probably take 1 - 2GB easily. Throw in Photoshop which will gobble up RAM like no ones business. I really didn't think Photoshop was that big a deal, but once you start importing & manipulating a bunch of 7 - 10 megapixel images on a regular basis you start to see just how much RAM it really needs.You could probably also throw in a virtual machine running a Linux distro on it. Then maybe MS Visual Studios as well...
Any RAM you don't use Windows will put towards disk cache anyways...
undermined - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
once you start running multiple screens you can really max out 4GB pretty easy just by running a few web browsers with multiple tabs and/or flash content so if you also game at the same time you can have more ram for a game and multi-task without limiting the performance.Otherwise if you only use 1 monitor and are just running 1 game full screen then yes gaming wont really push over 4GB but the upside of bigger ram kits becoming the norm is the price for them will come down also so even if you have 8GB-16GB or more it isn't like it hurts your performance either so personally I'm seriously considering 16GB for my next build just so if I want to run VM's or video/ photo work concurrently I wont realistically have a ram bottleneck and at current prices aren't bad at all.
B3an - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
I've got 24GB on my current i7 980X setup. It's still not enough. Video editing software like Adobe After Effects really loves RAM. To make use of all 12 processor threads with this software i'd need atleast 32GB. The work i do in Photoshop also uses up to about 12GB (21MP+ res images with hundreds on layers).As for games i'd expect a dramatic jump in RAM usage when the next Xbox/PS4 comes out, possibly next year.
ciukacz - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
sure, no problem, i can easily think of many scenarios that would eat any amount of ram. virtualisation, sql server (i could do development on my home setup) obviously come to mind (sql server will happily eat any amount of ram you throw at it).but it looks to me like your usage scenarios lean towards professional side.
i guess you are right about next-gen consoles.
B3an - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
Yep my computer is more a workstation. I admit that the average user definitely wont need 16GB for anything, especially 24GB like i have. But then SNB-E is certainly not for an average user, like with 1366 boards.Although the more RAM you have the more Windows 7/Vista will use. I only have Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash open now, with Chrome, and it's using almost 8GB. If i had half the RAM it would be using around 5GB for this. Also when i boot up and nothing is open it uses way more RAM than on a 4GB system for instance. So the OS makes use of this extra RAM even if you're not doing much, which makes it snappier.
kenpmason@yahoo.com - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
You're absolutely right, Win 7 will take--and use--as much as it can. And since RAM is so inexpensive now, having 8-12GB has become the new norm for desktops. This also helps to future-proof your system.Who was it who said that 640K was as much as we'd ever need? Just imagine--1GB? Impossible!
seapeople - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
But with that kind of a set up, you obviously also have a SSD doing 400+ MB/s sequential transfer speed. Is it even possible to notice the split-second delay your computer experiences paging one of your uber images to disk when you open up your 30th image?But yeah, I suppose you're out of luck with the video editing thing.