Corsair Memory Testing: 8GB vs 4GB

I was kinda hoping for a bit more from this article as I have 8GB and don't make use of it but as far as I can tell the summary is you can have more stuff open than you could ever practically keep track of.

From your post I was expecting more about tweaks that could be made in Windows to ensure you got the benefit.
 
OS tweaks in general are not going to be very effective with modern 64bit OSs. Vista and especially WIN 7 already do a great job at managing memory and especially so when you feed them RAM.
 
More significantly, the 8GB PC was able to load the Crysis Warhead application far more quickly than the 4GB system, which often needed to ‘swap out’ a significant amount of data into the page file in order to free up space. We were unable to reliably benchmark this delay, but depending on the memory usage of the system, it could take 2-3 minutes to display the Crysis Warhead ‘splash screen’ after launching the application. By contrast, the 8GB system was able to launch the game within a minute.
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Something doesn't sound right there, 2-3 minutes to display the splash screen? :eek: I'd only expect that if running a helluva lot of background apps, which most people wouldn't do while gaming.

While I'm sure it's possible to manipulate such a scenario by deliberately filling up a fwe gigs of memory beforehand, it's a little misleading as I imagine the vast majority of people with 4GB of RAM can load the game in under 2mins, even with their standard background tasks running (systray stuff, email, web browser etc).
 
It does give you an idea tho if your a power user who doesn't want to shut down 20 apps before running crysis... while that specific example isn't really a real world consideration its useful to know for people who are say developing a game and have tons of development software open and testing the game at frequent intervals and so on.
 
Yellowbeard said:
It's not manipulation in the context of this article.
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Which, not wanting to be too cynical appears to be "We want to convince you that need to buy lots more memory that you don't need"

I can see that 3GB might be a bit short and 6GB would be better but unless you plan to have open at one time;
Microsoft outlook 2007
11x Excell 2007 spreadsheets
3 x Powerpoint presentations
2x Word 2007 documents
1x PDF document
Adobe photoshop elements 7 (with 127 photos open!!)
Adobe Premiere elements 7
Guild Wars
Couter-Strike Source
2x Firefox 3.5 Web Browser
Spotify Music Player
Tweerdeck Tiwtter Application
windows Live Messenger
Thunderbird email and news application
Steam
Micro Web TV
Flickr Organiser
GIMP Image Editor
Personal Finance Apps (???)
Virtual PC running Ubuntu

as the test system in the article did I would imagine that for most people the move from 4GB to 8GB would not be noticeable.

Personally If I had that many things open it would take me more time to locate the excel spreadsheet I wanted than to just open it again from fresh!
 
Namak said:
Which, not wanting to be too cynical appears to be "We want to convince you that need to buy lots more memory that you don't need"
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As noted, keep in mind the context of the article. Anyone that has a clue how to do all the things in this article is probably also capable of assessing their own memory needs. They certainly aren't going to be brainwashed by this. It's simply meant to be an informative article, documenting some of our lab testing.
 
Thanks for the article Yellowbeard. It's good to see virtualised ubuntu recommended, virtualbox is one of the main reasons I see for large amounts of ram. You've missed a trick in not mentioning ramdisks though as the range of options available through these is astonishing. Temporary/variable files in tmpfs for ubuntu reduces random writes to the ssd allowing it to focus on other things, databases or games in windows work rather better from ram disk than from ssd.

I laughed at the mention of 12gb & i7, for me the biggest motivation to leave 775 was the effective 8gb limit. On my first set of corsair ram with it and can't fault you, so thank you for that too :)
 
While I like to see empirical evidence, it's pretty obvious that 8GB RAM is going to outperform 4GB in situations where you make the system use more than 4GB total memory. No doubt next year we'll get a similar article showing how 12GB outperforms 8GB.
 
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