"...A poll by any other name would smell as sweet as DRAM..."
by Gary Key on April 9, 2009 11:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Gary's First Looks
Now that William Shakespeare is rolling over in his grave due to the hack job on one of his more famous quotes in Romeo and Juliet, we can proceed straight to our poll for today. The first of several DDR2/DDR3 articles arrives shortly and we would like to know your thoughts up front on a variety of subjects surrounding system memory.
We will sidestep sticky questions like what is your favorite and worst memory supplier until later on this month. For today, we would greatly appreciate a response (informed or otherwise) to our three questions. Our first question concerns the primary driving factor that determines why you select a particular memory type or supplier. Personally, I want a quality product that is stable and never once makes me wonder why that BSOD occurred right before saving my article document. I am probably in the minority on this one but it will be interesting to see what you think.
Our second question is a simple one. How much system memory do you have currently? Once again, I am probably in the minority, as I tend to run eight to twelve gigabytes in my personal systems. My family and I tend to multitask a lot - or perhaps we are just too lazy to close multiple applications. Either way, I prefer a responsive system when working or playing and additional memory does tend to help. How much it helps is a question we will answer this month.
The final question is actually very simple. With Vista 64 finally having decent driver support, memory prices near all time lows, applications consuming even greater amounts of memory, and Windows 7 shipping later this year with an emphasis on 64-bit support, do you think it is time to buy more memory. The memory manufacturers are hoping for a resounding yes to this question. I think you can never have enough memory and at today's prices that isn't too difficult to accomplish.
We look forward to your answers and any comments you might have on this subject.
{poll 129:1200}
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garydale - Thursday, April 16, 2009 - link
"With Vista 64 finally having decent driver support" left me laughing. I've been running a 64bit OS for a couple of years now and its always had great hardware and software support. Microsoft came late to the 64bit game and also muddied the waters by releasing a 32bit version so that you wouldn't have to run your shiny new 64bit machine the way it was designed to be run.That's the problem with closed source software. There is lots of old hardware for which the vendors haven't updated the drivers to 64bits. With Linux, the only drivers that aren't updated are ones that can't run on 64bit machines (remember ISA & EISA cards).
As for memory, well I've got 6G of DDR2-800 (2x2G + 2x1G) because after the mail-in rebates, it was about $10/G. I noticed the other day that somehow the BIOS memory speed had dropped to 667 so I put it back up to 800. I didn't notice any improvement in the responsiveness of my computer. It may show in a benchmark but not in real life. Other things, like archiving my old e-mail regularly, make a much greater difference.
Of course, running without memory paging is great. However, it's other things that make the real difference. For example, I just reinstalled an older version of VLC because it worked better and was much easier on system resources than the current version. Now I can easily run multiple VLC sessions without problems whereas the current version for my OS would cause stuttering. And other players would cause even worse problems.
The bottom line is that proper software choices can make a greater difference than your hardware much of the time. Memory speed is way down on my list of priorities.
ClagMaster - Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - link
"As for memory, well I've got 6G of DDR2-800 (2x2G + 2x1G) because after the mail-in rebates, it was about $10/G. I noticed the other day that somehow the BIOS memory speed had dropped to 667 so I put it back up to 800. I didn't notice any improvement in the responsiveness of my computer. It may show in a benchmark but not in real life. Other things, like archiving my old e-mail regularly, make a much greater difference."I saw the same thing when I upgraded a close friends personal computer from 2GB DDR2-667 to 2GB DDR2-800. The computer was a DG965OT mobo with an E6400 C2D running XP Home. No discernable difference in performance.
Truenofan - Thursday, April 16, 2009 - link
had to buy a 4gb kit of ram so i could rma my last 2gb of ocz reaper ddr2. now im happily running 8gb of ram. no more swap file access and i can max out textures in games. its always nice having enough ram to run what you want, how you want it.marraco - Wednesday, April 15, 2009 - link
Please, if you review a lot of ram (6-12 or more GB), Implement a RamDisk (if possible, compressed) with the swap file located in it.At the times of windows 95/98, it gave a huge performance boost, by avoiding frequent disk access.
Swap files in XP age where really difficult, but today there are many new RamDisk software, capable of implementing it, and it does not matter how much memory you add to windows, it keeps unnecessary accessing the disk to swap. and bigger memory , means bigger swapping, making it worst.
bpdski - Tuesday, April 14, 2009 - link
I run a lot of applications at the same time like Visual Studio, Firefox, etc that consume huge amounts of memory. I really want to go to 64bit Vista and have 8GB in my laptop and 16GB in my desktop but I am not paying a 10X premium for that memory. It has been this way for several months now, I hope you will delve into this some in your article and help enlighten us on why it is taking so long for these modules to become more available.- Brian
Vivi22 - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
I use 64-bit Vista with 8GB of RAM in my desktop personally. Part of what I use it for is producing music and with some very RAM hungry VST sample libraries in my PC music arsenal I prefer to go for too much rather than too little if anything. Granted there are ways around not having enough RAM (ie: bouncing tracks to wav) but there are times when I want to edit several tracks at once and being able to work on them in real time is really handy.nah - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
that show which M/B or HDD we use, how long does an average brand last, we could even include monitors or CPUs although i think they last for a pretty long time on average--it would be nice to know which HDD brand was going to have a higher chance of lasting on average for 5 years or more--Google's study explicitly stated that 34 % of HDDs were bound to fail within 5 years of running 24/7--were the brands Hitachi, Samsung ? what--it would be nice to know if we had a running poll on this
kidsafe - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
Count me as another in the Mushkin camp. I don't paying a small premium for Mushkin memory.1) They advertise timings at reasonable voltages.
2) Their customer support forums were very good to me. Greg the timings guru comes to mind...even though he's not there anymore.
Fineghal - Sunday, April 12, 2009 - link
Alter the poll slightly to include OS limits?I for example, run XP 32bit still. Since there is essentially a 2-3Gb userspace limit - running with more than 4 is pointless.
TA152H - Saturday, April 11, 2009 - link
OK, I've gotten used to really uninformed things said in blogs, but this one is so bad, it needs to be addressed. You have to know better than this.Back in the bad old days, the amount of memory was more important than the processors, and it's why CISC processors were so pervasive then, since when you had 48K, code density was REALLY important. Sadly, even though most people didn't have micros from that period, the myth still persists that more memory is better. It's so uninformed and stupid, it's got to be addressed. Good thing we have blogs like this to make things worse.
More memory is not only sometimes useless, it's even bad. More memory only increases performance when you didn't have enough to start with. It comes down to virtual memory, and whether you need to use it or not. If you have enough memory that you don't overcommit, more memory isn't generally useful. I say generally, because someone, somewhere can make write an application that actually tests for the amount of memory present, and create internal caching for his app based on it. And of course, the operating system will grab extra memory for caches, which could show a very small improvement in performance (it could also reduce performance in rare circumstances).
The point is, more is not better! It can be only to the point where you have enough that you don't swap. After that, it's negligible for most applications. Also, in some cases, as you add more DIMMs to the slots, you have to run with reduced timings. Consider also, the extra power use you pay for, for no reason, if you have far more memory than you need.
If you have the choice between really fast 4 GB of memory, and slow 8 GB of RAM, and you don't swap with 4GB, it's a much better choice. You'll get better performance, and use less power, and generate less heat. More ISN'T always better.
Also, I always turn off virtual storage in Windows. I do agree with one point, with memory so cheap, you never should be swapping. Turning it off does improve performance, and even speeds up boot time very slightly. Plus, you'll always know when you need more memory, there's just no way around it.