Am I missing the point with 8gb of ram? Seems pointless to me

jaybee

jaybee

jaybee

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I am thinking of upgrading to Vista 64 bit just so I can use 8gb of ram for a hd video and photo editing machine, but surely none of the apps are written to utilize 64 bit and hence more than 3gb of ram such as the main industry standard - stil 32 bit - apps I would use such as Photoshop / Premier etc. Are people mainly upgrading to 8gb just because it's currently cheap and to future proof? To me, it seems a pointless excersise (unless you currently run lots of virtual machines), in that by the time 8gb will really be utilized, DDR3 will be in use more and the investment in DDR2 8gb will be wiped out anyway?

I am just trying to be realistic with myself as to whether I will see a benefit with all the effort of upgrading from XP to Vista 64bit for more ram. Or whether I should plod on with XP until late summer when hopefully Windows 7 is out and I can skip Vista. But then the same argument would still exist as to whether 8gb of ram can be used.

What do you think?
 
photo shop CS4 is a 64bit application, and after effects can use as much ram as you can give it, by doubling up processes. also for multi tasking and workflow use (like haveing say, photoshop and premier open at the same time, while surfing the net and listening to music) the more ram the better
 
I have a Tri-SLI i7 F@H setup and I'm running 12Gb RAM to give each GPU just under 4Gb each. It makes a definite difference to performance having plenty of memory available for each thread to work optimally. One machine does almost 27,000 points per day, which is enormous. If I drop back to 6Gb I lose about 4,000 points per day, which is too much given that I'm running 24/7 and I need all the points/watt I can get:D
 
WJA96 said:
I have a Tri-SLI i7 F@H setup and I'm running 12Gb RAM to give each GPU just under 4Gb each. It makes a definite difference to performance having plenty of memory available for each thread to work optimally. One machine does almost 27,000 points per day, which is enormous. If I drop back to 6Gb I lose about 4,000 points per day, which is too much given that I'm running 24/7 and I need all the points/watt I can get:D
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That would be a nice gaming rig wja96, ive used sli in the past, nforce4 and 6800gt's, then nforce 680i with dual 7900gt's, i loved my evga 680ia1 with an e6600 (3.7ghz) unfortunately it didnt get on with my q6600, hence the change to p45.
 
Nooooo! Games reduce folding points!:D

Actually - it's an incredible gaming system with three 700MHz GTX280's in Tri-SLI it runs Crysis and Far Cry 2 at very high frame rates indeed.
 
WJA96 said:
Nooooo! Games reduce folding points!:D

Actually - it's an incredible gaming system with three 700MHz GTX280's in Tri-SLI it runs Crysis and Far Cry 2 at very high frame rates indeed.
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I like the gtx 280 myself, im running one on my current system, after having an 8800gts 512, which struggled at 1920x1200, ive got the gtx 280 and it clocks pretty nice, 714 core, 1251 memory and 1504 on the shaders, cod4 is my main game and its nice to be able to play it now with a lot of detail at high res:)
 
8gb of RAM has its uses. A virtual machine with XP loaded and assigned 2gb of RAM works very well. A virtual machine installed onto a 5 or 6gb ramdisk works ridiculously well.

I think the benefit is mainly along the lines of the above for me. Anything you can move into a ramdisk works brilliantly. I don't use photoshop, but loading times for a game installed onto a ramdisk are ridiculous, and any data compression or database work is similarly improved. A really massive excel spreadsheet isnt going to be more than a few hundred mb, but the cache for photoshop can be rather larger I believe.

So yeah. Definitely get 8gb if you like playing with tmpfs, I'd like to have 16 I think :)
 
with photoshop and other application like 3d Modelling - the more ram you can throw at it the better - with photoshop more ram equates into less lag and better handling of high rez images
 
I too run Vista 64 and upped the memory to 8gb for Photoshop CS4.

I tend to run Lightroom and PS together, with Itunes in the background.

4gb was good, but with 8gb it defo runs better, Adobe claim as much as 15% performance gain with over 4gb ram.

Can't tell if Crysis or UT3 perform any better, certainly no worse though.

As you say ddr2 is getting fairly cheap, shame 16gb is so expensive at the moment though, as I'd go there for sure, but then PS eats up all the memory you can give it ha ah
 
I find Logic 8 can often use more than 4gb of RAM... 8GB is nice, and DDR2 is cheap...

DDR3 is a waste of money right now also, and triple channel is pointless...
 
Just working in Lightroom, with PS, Itunes and Outlook also running and now that I've turned on the dreaded sidebar I can see that I'm nudging 5gb so for sure Vista 64 and enabled apps can and do use more than 4gb if it's there.
 
MikeHunt79 said:
I find Logic 8 can often use more than 4gb of RAM... 8GB is nice, and DDR2 is cheap...

DDR3 is a waste of money right now also, and triple channel is pointless...
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You realise DDR3 prices have been crashing fast, right? It's like £100 for 4GB now. Still more expensive than DDR2, but pretty nice.
 
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