Gaming : 8GB vs 4GB system RAM
- Thread starter Relentless81
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Caporegime
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+1
when i got my ram it worked out at like £50 for 4 x 2gb, for the sake of an extra £25, i think having 8gb over 4gb of ram may come in useful from time to time.
i have increased the cache size of utorrent, and done some other wee changes etc. so it does less reads and writes to the hard drive. so what if it uses a lot of ram now, i have plenty of it spare.
E8600 on stock is not enough for dual gpu...configurations, the 4870x2 is still powerful card.
I would recommend to oc your processor to avoid the obvious bottleneck on stock with the 4870x2 especially in the minimum fps segment, i saw huge differenence on my old rig with same processor/card
@OP the 84B is faster, in intensive tasks, and multytasking...for games? not sure..but i think some games will benefit from it, if not imagine playing game which use like 1.5GB ram and your system like 2GB so your already on edge..yes go for it.. the best would be 6Gb but on x58 system on other, i would go with the 8GB yes its overkill but you cant get lower then that and have dual channel running ram, just get 8GB and forget on the annoying HDDs swapping/stutters.
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iirc vista had a really stupid thing where it would reserve the same amoutn of the vram into the system ram under the games "allotment" (i r bad at the tech speak) used to cause **** loads of problems for high ram games combined with a 1/2gb gfx card because it left them with something stupid like <1 gb ram to use so they would crash.
Think it got fixed later on though and completely fixed in win 7
Sorry but that's just the heady dreams of fools.
Caporegime
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Meh, it really depends, sure consoles have little ram, they also work quite differently and are heavily optimised over Windows based gaming but theres few games alone that will push that much memory.
But thats the thing with Windows and a decent setup, you can do more than just "game". You can still play a lot of games with 2gb memory but doing so while leaving, Chrome, Firefox, a usenet program, VLC, and a lots of other apps open would be essentially impossible, on 4gb I can leave a load of stuff open but I do now and then hit the 4gb and watch my computer grind to a painful halt, did it only the other day with Lotro open and watching a film which started stuttering like mad.
That of course was down to Lotro and a memory leak so not quite fair
8gb would mean I could get away with more things at the same time, running one of my more intensive memory games aswell as something like photoshop doing something in the background is far easier on a 8gb machine than a 4gb machine.
Be honest, run 4gb, it you never run into a limitation or if its once every 3 months you find yourself needing to shut down 2 extra programs to run a game comftably, you really don't need 8gb. If you run into a 4gb limit frequently, like to do other intensive things in the background while gaming, buy the extra memory, more so while its cheap.
I ended up getting a new full 8gb of ddr2 when it was stupidly cheap, then at some stage got 4gb of ddr3 while not too expensive and sold the 8gb when the price was at its highest and ended up making money rather than losing it. I got another 4gb ddr3 when it was stupidly cheap and I might sell 4gb the next time it gets stupidly expensive.
But thats the thing with Windows and a decent setup, you can do more than just "game". You can still play a lot of games with 2gb memory but doing so while leaving, Chrome, Firefox, a usenet program, VLC, and a lots of other apps open would be essentially impossible, on 4gb I can leave a load of stuff open but I do now and then hit the 4gb and watch my computer grind to a painful halt, did it only the other day with Lotro open and watching a film which started stuttering like mad.
That of course was down to Lotro and a memory leak so not quite fair
8gb would mean I could get away with more things at the same time, running one of my more intensive memory games aswell as something like photoshop doing something in the background is far easier on a 8gb machine than a 4gb machine.
Be honest, run 4gb, it you never run into a limitation or if its once every 3 months you find yourself needing to shut down 2 extra programs to run a game comftably, you really don't need 8gb. If you run into a 4gb limit frequently, like to do other intensive things in the background while gaming, buy the extra memory, more so while its cheap.
I ended up getting a new full 8gb of ddr2 when it was stupidly cheap, then at some stage got 4gb of ddr3 while not too expensive and sold the 8gb when the price was at its highest and ended up making money rather than losing it. I got another 4gb ddr3 when it was stupidly cheap and I might sell 4gb the next time it gets stupidly expensive.
Ive got 4gb, but looking to add another 4 just for the sake of it. And plus, while its so cheap, in the future when it comes around to needing 8gb+, ram will probably be more expensive. So i see it, no harm in upgrading while its cheap enough, computers done, nothing else needs adding to it really.
My system was using around 8GB RAM of 12GB yesterday without a game running, sure some lot of that is cached - but i'd rather have commonly accessed stuff in RAM than have to be accessed from a disk.
4GB is not really enough these days, once you have your game at 2GB + OS that's a big chunk taken up. A few browser windows in the background and it's full.
4GB is not really enough these days, once you have your game at 2GB + OS that's a big chunk taken up. A few browser windows in the background and it's full.
Caporegime
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Pretty sure that's BS. I've been running 8 gig for over a year and rarely see over 3 gig used, the rest is cached. I'm sure we'd all be fine with 4 gigs.
A browser with a bunch of tabs open; some on youtube pages + a game going is easily 3-3.5GB. Add in a few Office apps and a couple of open PDFs and there you go, 4GB is used up by stuff that's semi active.
Sure the OS will page stuff to disk that's not needed for what you are doing right now - but swapping that back into RAM just adds latency.
Anyone else smile to themselves and think back to the days of 8 vs. 4 Mb of RAM?
Pfft, I remember when it was 1 KB and the eventual expansion was an external 16KB module that crashed the system if your desk so much as wobbled!Yep. I remember having 8MB for a very long time, and then stumping out about £130 to upgrade to a whopping 72MB (extra 64MB).
Was lightning at the time
Crazy how far things have moved in just over a decade really!
Same here, 4Gb is more than enough.
Associate
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Upgrading to 8GB is cheap at the moment. So although it may not actually help, I'm thinking of taking the plunge just because of how low the prices currently are.