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4 GIGS Of RAM - Overkill or Realistic?

Kadratis

Kadratis

Fleet Captain
Fleet Captain
Hi again tech peeps! :) It's great to have a place to ask tech questions when a Google search doesn't help out much. Anywho...

I just bit the bullet and bought three gigs of ram for my current desktop (which already currently has one gig). I have four questions, and sadly, yes, one of them has to do with Vista (please don't hurt me :angel:):
  • One: Will Windows Vista [Ultimate] 32-bit be able to detect all four gigabytes of memory or is it limited like XP is?
  • Two: Is four gigs of RAM overkill or realistic?
  • Three: The reason I am buying the RAM is because I do Photoshop work, some video editing, as well as gaming, so which should I expect to see greater performance (greatest to least), if any?
  • Four: I read somewhere that my video card will eat a chunk out of my RAM. Is this true? If so, how much?
And here's my specs in case anyone needs 'em :):
  • Intel Pentium D Processor 915 with Dual Core Technology (2.8GHz,800FSB)
  • Chaintech [NVidia] GeForce7600GS w/512 MB of VRAM
  • 160 GB (Primary) Hard Drive
  • 500 GB (Secondary) Hard Drive
  • 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz (Soon to be a total of four)
  • Windows Vista 32-Bit Ultimate

Thanks a bunch, guys! :thumbsup:
 
Kadratis said:
  • One: Will Windows Vista [Ultimate] 32-bit be able to detect all four gigabytes of memory or is it limited like XP is?
Click to expand...

It'll be able to detect all four perfectly fine, but like XP, it'll reserve one of them for the OS. It is hard to do things differently in a sensible manner on IA32. But according to Wikipedia, your processor does support the 64-bit instruction set.

  • Two: Is four gigs of RAM overkill or realistic?
Click to expand...

You'll still use all four gigabytes, it's just that the last one probably won't be used in its entirety.

  • Three: The reason I am buying the RAM is because I do Photoshop work, some video editing, as well as gaming, so which should I expect to see greater performance (greatest to least), if any?
Click to expand...

Intuitively, I'd say video editing, because the size of a video is most likely to exceed the capacity of your memory. Other people may have opinions based on experience.

  • Four: I read somewhere that my video card will eat a chunk out of my RAM. Is this true? If so, how much?
Click to expand...

This is true. Like your computer, your video card has memory. It's convenient (and fast!) to make this memory available by pretending it's part of your normal memory.

Under normal circumstances, the BIOS maps this memory outside the range of the RAM that's physically available on your computer.

As a simplification, imagine having two gigs of RAM, each having its own address, so 0 and 1. The BIOS would then 'map' the video card RAM at the unused address 2. The computer could then write data to address 2 just like normal memory, only it would be sent to the video card.

Because your RAM is large enough to fill up all the available addresses in your computer (and there's 4294967296 of them, not 4), it has to pick an address that's already occupied. Probably in the same range used by the OS, so you won't lose too much usable memory.
 
Thanks for the info, Zero Hour! :) I'm half-tempted to switch to the 64-bit version. Is there a reason to or not to after I receive the RAM? :confused:
 
I don't believe Photoshop runs right now in 64 bit, it's been a while since I checked.

I use Adobe Premiere regularly and it will use all available ram up to the size of the video. Raw .avi, which is what Premiere prefers, will run a lot gigabits for an hour of video, depending on resolution and sound bitrate. 14 gig for an hour I have sitting here right now. For a file this size, the difference between 3 and 4 gigs of ram won't make a huge difference, but if you're encoding a file that's 4 gigs or less the encoding will run much quicker.

The difference depends on whether you're doing it professionally or not too. If I was encoding for a living, I'd make much more money if my computer did it in 1 hour, rather than 4. But as a personal hobby, I just start the job before bed and run it overnight, so the speed isn't that much of an issue.
 
^ Heh, not a professional. Would like to be some day, but meh. I suppose I'll stick with 32-bit for now. :)

Another question: I play games often, say like Sims 2 or HL2 and it's consequential episodes. Will I see a difference in that area if any? I'm thinking about getting a new video card next, but if this increase in RAM makes gaming smoother, I'll skip it for the next few months.
 
Kadratis said:
I play games often, say like Sims 2 or HL2 and it's consequential episodes. Will I see a difference in that area if any?
Click to expand...

Maybe if you're playing them at the same time...

No.
 
saturn0660 said:
You can NEVER have to much ram... Hell, the new Mac Pro can be had with 32Gigs of ram..
Click to expand...

USB supports 127 devices per host controller, so what? I've never seen HL2 memory consumption reach even 1GB.
 
At work, I use Windows XP64. I have 4GB of RAM, and four cores in my machine.

And it still bogs down when I try to run multiple operation-heavy programs at once. (I can of course run multiple apps at once, just not when they're actually doing something.) They're typically disk-heavy programs, so it might be that the disk interface is the bottleneck; but to a certain extent, it's just the unnecessarily large amount of swapping that the OS seems to do.

I might have been using a program five seconds ago, but as soon as I switch to something else to check its status, BAM, the other one is swapped out and it takes 30 seconds or more to get back to it.

So, will the extra RAM help? Yes, but Windows is still Windows.

Everyone else in my working group now runs Linux with XP64 in a VM. I'm thinking I'm behind the curve.
 
rType said:
saturn0660 said:
You can NEVER have to much ram... Hell, the new Mac Pro can be had with 32Gigs of ram..
Click to expand...

USB supports 127 devices per host controller, so what? I've never seen HL2 memory consumption reach even 1GB.
Click to expand...

Well I'd put an amended statement out... you can never have too much RAM as long as someone else is paying for it ;)
 
^ It's decided at bootup, by the BIOS, which also makes sure that no two devices are mapped to the same memory range.
 
But the BIOS always maps it to the same location (when no cahnges are made to the total memory of the system), right?
 
Arrghman said:
rType said:
saturn0660 said:
You can NEVER have to much ram... Hell, the new Mac Pro can be had with 32Gigs of ram..
Click to expand...

USB supports 127 devices per host controller, so what? I've never seen HL2 memory consumption reach even 1GB.
Click to expand...

Well I'd put an amended statement out... you can never have too much RAM as long as someone else is paying for it ;)
Click to expand...


You got that right... i'd be happy with a mac pro with 32gig but i know i'm not gonna pay for it..
 
Lior .B. said:
But the BIOS always maps it to the same location (when no cahnges are made to the total memory of the system), right?
Click to expand...

Probably, but it doesn't really matter because on a system with virtual memory, it's impossible to directly access any particular address unless you're running in kernel mode.
 
Lior .B. said:
But the BIOS always maps it to the same location (when no cahnges are made to the total memory of the system), right?
Click to expand...

In theory, this is unspecified, and you should always query the address range from the PCI bus.

In practice, as long as you don't add RAM or other cards (which can map memory too), the addresses will stay the same.

As Lindley said, this is of no use to you unless you're writing a driver.
 
Create a 2GB Ramdisk and put your SWAP file on it!!!!

They should make a SATA Disk that is nothing but RAM with a little bit of flash to Handle the FAT Table or just have it so that it makes a copy of the Dynamic RAM to FLASH when the machine powers off.


Make it like 16GB and you use it to hold your enourmous SWAP partition, call it a "Windows Accellerator" and sell the thing for like 500 bucks, people would buy it!! It might actually make Vista run reasonable.
 
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