Any wisdom in this upgrade?

  • Thread starter Thread starter DK
  • Start date Start date
DK said:
The modern trend of having 2-4 Gb of memory in a home PC
continues to surprise me. I almost never open files that are larger
than 50 Mb.
Click to expand...

My Canon software opens files that are around 5MB in size. If I open 10-20
of them (50MB -100MB of files) and do some work in all of them (change white
balance, crop, resize, convert from canon raw format to JPG etc), I can fill
my 1.5GB RAM very quickly. My point is, don't be fooled by filesize - this
has nothing to do with how much RAM the software will use.

Once your 50MB files are opened and manipulated, you will definitely use
more than 50MB RAM - I would expect you could easily be using 500MB RAM
before you do barely anything!. All depends on the software and what you are
doing.
 
The FSB will run at 1066 and will async the memory to run at a lower speed.
I used this board to upgrade to a Core 2 last fall and keep my existing
PC-3200 ram and ATI 9800pro. It ran the two speeds flawlessly. The only
issue I came across is that when I put in my Crucial Ballistix DDR400 ram I
was having issues. Turns out that the solution was to go with generic
DDR400 because this motherboard didn't like the 2-2-2-6 timings of the high
performance Crucial and the Crucial didn't like to run stable at slower
speeds based on my testing it in a few different systems. But with generic
ram I was able to run rock-solid. Of course, you will suffer a penalty for
using the DDR stuff when it comes to performance, but this board is perfect
for someone who wants to take advantage of a great combination of upgrade
avenues at a trade-off for cutting-edge performance. It also blew away my
previous setup of an Asus Nforce2 board and an Athlon XP3200+ when it came
to file encoding.
 
My Canon software opens files that are around 5MB in size. If I open 10-20
of them (50MB -100MB of files) and do some work in all of them (change white
balance, crop, resize, convert from canon raw format to JPG etc), I can fill
my 1.5GB RAM very quickly. My point is, don't be fooled by filesize - this
has nothing to do with how much RAM the software will use.

Once your 50MB files are opened and manipulated, you will definitely use
more than 50MB RAM - I would expect you could easily be using 500MB RAM
before you do barely anything!. All depends on the software and what you are
doing.
Click to expand...


An experiment then. Open programs: software firewall, file manager, email,
browser, newsreader, bitmap editor. Used memory: 202 Mb.

Opened 54 Mb BMP file, used memory: 240 Mb. Made five copies of it,
kept all six files open, used memory 502 Mb. Anything above that starts
using pagefile. Six copies of the same file open at the same time is definitely
an overkill. On top of that, I opened 10 Firefox windows, each filled with
different Yahoo pages, used memory now is 562 Mb (installed physical 512)
and there is *still* no appreciable slow down in any of the above programs.
On top of that I can even play 600 Mb DivX file (used memory becomes
608 Mb) and it loads with delay but plays plays fine. In other words, I
can do *anything* with that 50 Mb file *and* keep several intermediate
copies of it open for comparison *and* keep all other priograms running
fine. IMHO, this kind of load is very atypical for vast majority of
users, wouldn't you agree? There is absolutely no question there are
tasks that benefit from very large memory sizes but those are rare,
particularly on the consumer market.

DK
 
DK said:
An experiment then. Open programs: software firewall, file manager, email,
browser, newsreader, bitmap editor. Used memory: 202 Mb.

Opened 54 Mb BMP file, used memory: 240 Mb. Made five copies of it,
kept all six files open, used memory 502 Mb. Anything above that starts
using pagefile. Six copies of the same file open at the same time is
definitely
an overkill. On top of that, I opened 10 Firefox windows, each filled with
different Yahoo pages, used memory now is 562 Mb (installed physical 512)
and there is *still* no appreciable slow down in any of the above
programs.
On top of that I can even play 600 Mb DivX file (used memory becomes
608 Mb) and it loads with delay but plays plays fine. In other words, I
can do *anything* with that 50 Mb file *and* keep several intermediate
copies of it open for comparison *and* keep all other priograms running
fine. IMHO, this kind of load is very atypical for vast majority of
users, wouldn't you agree? There is absolutely no question there are
tasks that benefit from very large memory sizes but those are rare,
particularly on the consumer market.
Click to expand...

Fair enough, but you still haven't told us what these files are and what you
are trying to do with them. I can open hundreds of photos and my memory
usage doesn't go up dramatically, but as I said, as soon as I start to work
with the photos, the memory usage rockets due to the undo buffer in the
application.

Try this. With a fresh boot of windows, open one of your 50MB files, then
modify it, change it again, copy and paste something on it, then change
something else, build / convert / compress / process (don't know what your
application is!) and see what happens to your memory usage. Just opening a
file won't necessarily use lots of memory, but working with it probably
will. But I repeat - this depends on the software and what you are doing!

I was just answering your point about the need for loads of RAM in a PC. I
have 1.5GB and have the swap file turned off for maximum performance. I can
fill this amount of RAM when processing photos (lots of), so have to be
careful. This is the only application I have that uses major amounts of RAM,
but there are other apps that use loads of RAM - modern games for example
will tend to use as much as they can get their digital hands on.
 
Sleepy wrote:


[snip]
(as for the other 2 posts - anyone who fries a CPU only has themself
to blame NOT the CPU for being ignorant of proper system cooling and
operating temperatures.
Click to expand...

I totally agree and nearly posted the same thing. I live in New Zealand, it
gets plenty hot in summer yet I've safely run an XP1800+ (T'bredB) at 2.2GHz
and 1.775V vcore without the temp going over 65°C under full load on the
hottest day.

Then again, I'm not totally ignorant about CPU/case cooling.
 
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