Buy More RAM or GPU with more memory?

sunnyd76

sunnyd76

sunnyd76

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Joined
8 Feb 2015
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21
Hi Folks,

I have a 3570k with 16GB RAM. I have 3 monitors (1080/1440/5k). I use the system mostly for running trading apps via Chrome. Chrome is pretty memory hungry and can use up to 8GB of my system memory and 3.8GB of my GPU memory. When the system is under heavy load system memory usage can often hit 85%. I've noticed when I connect my 5k monitor that GPU memory usage goes up a fair bit.

I'm not sure how GPU memory works for desktop/2d applications. The question I have is that If I upgrade my main RAM to 32GB, will this reduce the memory usage on the GPU, i.e. will GPU share system memory and not have to swap to disk? Otherwise should I consider upgrading the GPU as well as RAM?

Other option is to update to a new Ryzen build with more RAM, I guess the extra threads would be a huge boost to the multitasking load also

Cheers,
Sunny
 
Cheers for the responses guys...

Badfish I'm running a trading app but that isn't the problem. My main charts actually run on a website called www.tradingview.com. The charts use up a lot of ram *and cpu. Firefox is better for memory, actually Waterfox is the best, but it has other issues because it doesn't support html5 correctly so charts are broken.

The GPU has 4GB memory, it's a GTX 980 Windforce. Not sure why it's using up so much GPU memory either, I assume it's because when my System memory hits 85% ish then the system allocates apps to the GPU - No idea though, i'm not sure if the GPU memory is shared with the system or not

Honeybadger. Do you know if the GPU and system memory are shared in windows 10 as per last paragraph? Thing is that to throw another cat amongst the pidgeons, Chrome uses hardware acceleration, so I assume some of the charts are rendered using the GPU (and hence in memory?).

I guess this goes back to the main question, if I ugrade my system memory (cheaply) will the GPU be able to offload programs from it's memory to the system memory and run better? Or will I need to upgrade my GPU with more memory to run the charts/5k etc...
 
Hey Smffy. Ahem, yes i have 42 tabs open and there are 55 chrome process running. i could reduce it down to 35 tabs but that would be the bare minimum i need to run
 
Hi Kurgen. I didn't realise you don't have to put GPU's in SLI - never owned more than one card at a time lol. So is non SLI the default configuration when the system detects 2> cards for the first time?

If the new build doesn't fix the issue then I'll look into this further... Will need to buy another GPU at some point in any case, want to have total of 6 monitors connected eventually
 
No old card unfortunately, but I could take a look for a used 1070 or lower, if I can find one with 8GB - should do the trick I hope!

Atm I'm thinking:

980 (4gb) would run: 1080/1440/4k
1060/1070 (8gb): 3 x 4k

What do you guys think?

Will See how I get on with the extra ram tomorrow and let you know what is decided

Cheers for your help all....
S
 
Sorry guys been busy with the build this week so not updated, but....

Since the upgrade of mobo/cpu/mem, the performance is a lot better. I think the system memory may have been a huge bottleneck. I still see the VRAM hitting 3.9gb but the web pages don't crash anymore and moving around them is far more fluid, so like you say, the cache is able to offload to RAM. There is still room for improvement as I'm running ddr4 2333Mhz, will try 3000MHz once i get this ******* graphics card issue resolved:

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/t...ocked-drivers-borked-new-x399-build.18790161/
 
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