8 Gig of RAM

Lee H

Hi

I just built a new gamin rig last week

Core 2 Duo E4500
Asus P5N-E SLI
NVidia GeForece 8600 GT
2 X 2Gig of RAM

Tomorrow i am buying another 8600 GT due to my mobo being SLI, i am also toying with the idea of buying an extra 4 Gig of RAM, i will of course be installing 64 bit OS, prob Vista. Am thinking if i ever need XP for something i could always Vitual PC an install of it quite easy

Anyone gone from 4 gig to 8 gig and recommend it

Any help would be great

Lee H

ULWiz

Of course its good to jump from 4 to 8GB. And enjoy.

Lee H

I know its good, but is it cost effective, will i see a performance increase that is worthy of the money??

dynamik

Are you using more than 4gb? If not, there's no point. You can always pop it later when prices drop and you actually need it.

blargoe

Unless you are going to be running a LOT of VM's you probably won't use 8GB of memory. 4GB on x64 should give you more than enough.

leefdaddy

Yeah, I'd recommend it if you plan to use lots of VMs, it's definitely nice for that.

Kasor

I agreed, make sure you install VM. The only OS that you cannot install is OS X from Apple.

dynamik

Kasor wrote:

I agreed, make sure you install VM. The only OS that you cannot install is OS X from Apple.

Really?

Also, AFAIK, this is for his gaming rig, not a VM setup. 8GB is overkill IMO.

If you're not doing VMs, video/audio editing, 3D design, etc., there's no point.

Pash

Hi Lee,

Nice rig mate, thats gonna run some nice games!

As mentioned above 4gig is more than suffice for running most games atm and it will also run VMware nicely for creating some good labs. You can also get yourself some flash memory and use readyboost for vm setups if you wanna run more machines. Ive been told by mates that 64bit drivers are being released every day now and all those 32bit games/apps can be run still.

Enjoy!

Talic

Vista 64 runs fine and the drivers run fine except for Creative's alchemy EAX drivers. I've only been able to try one game so far with it but the results aren't great. After enabling EAX in the game it gives a nasty echo.

As for needing 4 GBs of ram... like everyone says, unless you are running a lot of VMs then its really hard to use all that ram. Every game I've played so far doesn't let me use over 60% of my ram and I monitor it using my G15's keyboard screen.

Also, why did you go SLI with two 8600s? Usually just a faster card is a better choice rather then two slower cards. SLI always has either overhead or just doesn't work/work well in some games.

Lee H

Hi

Also, why did you go SLI with two 8600s? Usually just a faster card is a better choice

Origonally i was only buying 1 card, but seeing as i have a SLi mobo i wanna make it as fast as i can, these cards are only £50 each, are you saying there is a better card than 2 of these that would cost £100

Are you using more than 4gb? If not, there's no point

How do i check to see how much memory is being used, does it put it in a log file??


Thanks for all your info, shall put the other 4 on hold for now until i have played Crysis, i have heard you need a blade server to run it on full settings


Lee H

Talic

Heres some benchmarks for the cards you are looking at http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3234&p=3

I'd take the money from the ram and put it toward the video card and try to get a full refund on your 8600 if you bought it already.

In gaming, you'll get more benefit from a faster video card then more ram. The bottleneck of the system is the video card brutal games like Crysis along with any other modern game.

It looks like the best card for your price range is either a 9600GT, 8800GT or a 3870. Since I don't live in Europe I really can't help you with pricing.

Other benchmarks are
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3235&p=2
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3266&p=5
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gainward-bliss9600gt-512gs.html

Lee H

Hi Guys

I took your advice guys and put the 4 gig on hold, just bought another 8600 GT, got it on SLI,

Thing is, am i meant to see a difference between 2 graphics cards or 1, how do i benchmark my PC with 1 card in then 2 to see if there a diffence

Lee H

JDMurray

Lee H wrote:

Thing is, am i meant to see a difference between 2 graphics cards or 1, how do i benchmark my PC with 1 card in then 2 to see if there a diffence

Use a video graphics benchmarking program, like 3DMark by Futuremark and check the numbers with one card and with two. (Download 3DMark06 Basic Edition.) Alternately, try running a very graphics intensive game, like Half-life 2 or Crysis.

Tyrant1919

8 Gigs of ram and you can reliably turn off the page file. That's what I plan on doing soon.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/15/vista_workshop/index.html

JDMurray

Tyrant1919 wrote:

8 Gigs of ram and you can reliably turn off the page file. That's what I plan on doing soon.

I don't recommend that. There are programs that write to the page file regardless of how much free memory is available. The page file is a great place for programmers to hide data when we don't want to put sensitive information in easily findable and copyable temp files. If no page file exists the program may become unstable, or even crash if the programmer didn't consider the possibility of a non-existent page file.

paintb4707

Lee H wrote:

I know its good, but is it cost effective, will i see a performance increase that is worthy of the money??

Two 8600GTs in SLI is most certainly not cost effective for performance. As stated above, one faster card would perform much better. SLI is really for super high resolutions, but if you have less than a 30" monitor you wouldn't have to worry about that anyways.

SLI was and always will be a waste of money if you ask me. But nowadays all the boards are built for it.

dynamik

There's a lot more to graphics performance than just resolution. Anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, quality of shadows and effects, etc. Pull up the graphics options for any recent graphics-intensive game. There are dozens of options. Cranking everything up at just 1920x1200 will make any modern card chug, if it is even able to perform at all.

However, I agree that putting two 8600GTs is not economical. You should buy the single faster card you can afford, then a year or two later, when it starts to struggle, pop another one in for significantly less.

I'm not sure why so many people dislike SLI. It's come a long way, and provides a significant performance boost. You're not going to get twice the performance because there is some overhead, but it's worth it if you're patient and add the second card when it's cheap. One of my friends who is running late 7xxx cards gets about a 75% performance increase from the second card.

Lee H

Hi

Thing is, i never planned on going SLI until after i bought the 8600 GT, i was not going to get a refund as i had used it, but i opted for 2 of them in the hope to get better performance

Will be running a test on them soon as i have time

I also didnt want to spend £200 on a graphics card as money was a bit tight, thats why i went for the core 2 duo 4500 instead of 6800? which has double the L2 cache, hence budget card too

This is my first attempt at a gamin rig an it suits me fine, i just wanted to know if 8 gig of ram would make any difference to warrant its purchase


Next rig is going in for nvidia pc build of the month, will budget £1500+

Lee H

Tyrant1919

JDMurray wrote:

I don't recommend that. There are programs that write to the page file regardless of how much free memory is available. The page file is a great place for programmers to hide data when we don't want to put sensitive information in easily findable and copyable temp files. If no page file exists the program may become unstable, or even crash if the programmer didn't consider the possibility of a non-existent page file.

I think it would be alright for what I do, I'll test it in the future.

Talic

I agree with JD on not turning off the page file, even on Vista 64 with 4GB of ram my computer still accesses the page file. It doesn't a lot but I could tell before I installed SP1 since I had my page file on a different drive from Vista. Vista would put my two other hard drives to sleep (the one with the page file) and I would notice when it would spin them up from power saving mode. It would also cause a delay in whatever program was accessing the page file. Even after I would set the HDD sleep timer to 60 minutes it would still spin down the hard drives and spin up the page file drive pretty frequently. Not to mention it was loud.

Luckily SP1 fixed it; otherwise I would of went back to XP.

HeroPsycho

dynamik wrote:

I'm not sure why so many people dislike SLI. It's come a long way, and provides a significant performance boost. You're not going to get twice the performance because there is some overhead, but it's worth it if you're patient and add the second card when it's cheap. One of my friends who is running late 7xxx cards gets about a 75% performance increase from the second card.

Why I don't like it:

A. The motherboard costs more.
B. You need a more expensive power supply than if you just had a single card.
(Now add the additional costs of both and see what better single card solution you could have purchased right off the bat or saved for when you need a new card later. Remember, the price difference between an 8600GT these days and an 8800GT is not much, but there's a big performance difference between the two!)
C. Doubles noise in your machine from video card fans.
D. Increases your system temperature compared to a single card solution, not to mention would use more electricity, thereby increasing somewhat your power bill.
E. Even adding a second card down the road is usually a bad value. Recently, I was in the situation I could have bought a second 7800GT and go SLI. I opted instead for a Radeon X1950XT. It cost barely anymore than the second 7800GT which was getting hard to find at the time, gave better performance than 2x 7800GT's, and I sold my 7800GT for $80, making it a far better value as I spent less and got better performance to boot.

Also, remember that adding a second card at best can only give you more throughput. You miss out on new features of newer cards. For example, if you had let's say a 7900GT right now, if you added another vs getting let's say an 8800GS, you don't get full DX10 support.

Personally, I don't see much good out of going SLI, but if I were to consider it, it would be to do it immediately, not add the other card later.