8GB?

Adrianr · 7 Mar 2009 at 18:22

Ahhh how the general attitude has changed!!

When I asked a simple question on technical problems installing 8GB of ram everyone jumped down my throat for even thinking of such a ridiculous endevour. (This also wasn't at a time when the largest program used 200mb of ram either btw, I'm still using the same software now save for CS4 instead of CS3)

I run 16GB now, best computer upgrade yet IMO

Paul11 · 7 Mar 2009 at 19:08

Craig321 said:
Planning on getting 8GB myself soon - unfortunately I have 4x1GB sticks at the moment so I'll need to buy all 8Gb together.

Still, only about £65 for 4x2GB and it'll give me a decent performance boost, especially when running Windows 7/Vista under VMWare

same here, had to order 8gb and will have to sell on my 4 x 1gb

but still worth it for the price.

Craig321 · 7 Mar 2009 at 19:17

What RAM did all you guys go for when buying 8GB?

The Corsair is a decent price, but the Kingston has 4-4-4-12 timings instead of 5-5-5-15 - is it worth the extra few £?

Phil2008 · 7 Mar 2009 at 19:22

LEAVE THE PAGEFILE ALONE

thepeganator · 7 Mar 2009 at 19:53

I got my first 4gb from a competitor, and got my 2nd 4gb from another forum.

Nothing wrong with editing the pagefile if you know what you're doing and the limits

Type_R · 7 Mar 2009 at 20:57

Went from 4GB of OCZ Reaper 9200 to 8GB of Kingston 8500 HyperX and Vista64 is flying and games are just soo much smoother!

If you haven't made the leap yet, the time is now!

dangerstat · 7 Mar 2009 at 21:01

never ... read ... so ... much ... carp ... in ... my ... life

stoofa · 8 Mar 2009 at 11:05

It would appear a lot of people have money burning holes in their pockets and are attempting to convince themselves more than anything that buying 8GB of RAM will make an "amazing difference".
At the end of the day each persons call - but really, 4GB to 8GB is not going to make the difference some people are claiming.

As for playing around with the Pagefile, do yourself a favour - don't.
Windows knows what it is doing with that pagefile a lot better than you do.
I can promise you now that no matter how much playing around you do you'll not make any difference to performance.
Gone are the days when the first thing you did was set the pagefile to static rather than dynamic (Win 3.x).

gt_junkie · 8 Mar 2009 at 11:13

dangerstat said:
never ... read ... so ... much ... carp ... in ... my ... life

stoofa said:
It would appear a lot of people have money burning holes in their pockets.

Easy guys!

Just peoples opinions.

For the general low cost of DDR2 in particular it makes sense. Bought 8gb cheap just to try and found that it does make a difference to my Vista experience so i decided to keep it. :confused:

gt

CK61938 · 8 Mar 2009 at 11:29

Well I can safely say I have been toying with the idea of banging another 4GB in my gaming machine to up it to 8GB and you lovely people have made my mind up for me. I already have the Corsair XMS2 2x2GB lot...so might as well go for them since they are so damn cheap!! It aint even funny...

thepeganator · 8 Mar 2009 at 11:49

I bought my second 4gb for my second machine at first, but that was down at the tme, so I decided (as it as the same as the other pair) to put it in my main computer.

Never took it out, as to me it feels faster and I like it.

marscay · 9 Mar 2009 at 09:24

gt_junkie said:
Easy guys!

Just peoples opinions.

For the general low cost of DDR2 in particular it makes sense. Bought 8gb cheap just to try and found that it does make a difference to my Vista experience so i decided to keep it.

gt

exactly, i've run with 8gb on my Vista box for 12mths or more.....since went back to 4gb for a little period w/out drama but i much prefer 8gb.

just threw a couple of the sammy SSD's into my main rig and so i went back to 8GB so i could run with readyboost + pagefile + temp files etc on a decent sized ramdisk....i find it quite easy to chew through 4GB under Vista also so that's another reason entirely.

i feel no desire to jump onto DDR3 just yet so at the current prices let's load up

Corasik · 9 Mar 2009 at 10:43

dmxdex2020 said:
What should you set your page file to with 4 gig of ram with vista?

Pagefile is a tricky one. When an application is setting up its virtual memory pool (well ok windows sets it up for the app), it considers the total available memory including the pagefile, before telling the application how much it can have.

If you have plenty of memory, the pagefile will normally contain nothing, or very seldem used data, but it will tease the applications to use more real ram, as windows isnt "worried" about running out. So performance is often better with a pagefile still set.

I still set pagefile as the same as the physical memory. Disk space is cheap, so who cares about wasting a little.

Phil2008 · 9 Mar 2009 at 13:03

I dont see any point altering the pagefile, yeh I know windows uses 8gb hdd space up, but is that so much of a prob if you have stacks of hdd space? At the end of the day, like someone has said, vista knows what its doing with the page file much better then you do, so leave it alone.

marscay · 9 Mar 2009 at 13:19

because it's pointless having an 8gb pagefile on a slow access hdd if you have 8gb of addressable memory.

when you have a lot of memory it's better to use a ramdisk and put a small pagefile on there, there's absolutely nothing wrong with tweaking the pagefile yourself.....the automatic setting is there for ppl who wouldn't know what a pagefile is let alone tinker with it.

Paul11 · 9 Mar 2009 at 13:20

marscay said:
exactly, i've run with 8gb on my Vista box for 12mths or more.....since went back to 4gb for a little period w/out drama but i much prefer 8gb.

just threw a couple of the sammy SSD's into my main rig and so i went back to 8GB so i could run with readyboost + pagefile + temp files etc on a decent sized ramdisk....i find it quite easy to chew through 4GB under Vista also so that's another reason entirely.

i feel no desire to jump onto DDR3 just yet so at the current prices let's load up

how much ram do you assign to the ramdisk and how big pagefile did you put on it?

steve258 · 9 Mar 2009 at 15:12

am tempted to go 8gb but am worried about compatibility with my current oc and the potential headaches of having all 4 dimms occupied by 2gb sticks.

personally I just leave the pagefile alone, have played with it before and noticed no difference. Windows will use real ram when it can.

marscay · 9 Mar 2009 at 18:07

Paul11 said:
how much ram do you assign to the ramdisk and how big pagefile did you put on it?

i've got a 2GB Ramdisk with 500MB pagefile and 1GB of ReadyBoost, i'm still playing around with sizes.....everything is so fast with these SSD's that it's harder to measure differences

Adrianr · 9 Mar 2009 at 18:10

marscay said:
i've got a 2GB Ramdisk with 500MB pagefile and 1GB of ReadyBoost, i'm still playing around with sizes.....everything is so fast with these SSD's that it's harder to measure differences

What software do you use to create your Ramdisk? I used SuperSpeed untill a certain file originating from that program stopped my Vista install booting up. I removed it and everythings been fine since, so i've not had much desire to install it again.

Type_R · 9 Mar 2009 at 19:36

dangerstat said:
never ... read ... so ... much ... carp ... in ... my ... life

I take it you have both 4Gb and 8Gb on a Vista 64 machine and have noticed no difference, if not then perhaps you can expand on the basis for your comment.

stoofa said:
It would appear a lot of people have money burning holes in their pockets and are attempting to convince themselves more than anything that buying 8GB of RAM will make an "amazing difference".
At the end of the day each persons call - but really, 4GB to 8GB is not going to make the difference some people are claiming.

Perhaps the 'amazing difference' is actually in the context that spending another £40 on any piece of hardware will not speed up a mid-end machine as much as dropping in another 4Gb.