Going from 4Gb to 8Gb - Worthwhile?

Draeger

Draeger

Draeger

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I've got 4x1GB modules of GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency Dual Channel RAM sat in my Asus P5K Vanilla mobo. This stuff, bought it here from the shop a while back:-

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-058-GL

I'm looking to squeeze out a last little bit of performance from my current Q6600 based system before I build a new i7 based system later in the year. This will include grabbing a pre-owned 6950 or similar GPU to replace my 9800GTX+. However I'm thinking I may upgrade my RAM as well, to 8GB from my current 4GB. The P5K supports a max of 8GB and only 2GB per slot so I'm looking to obtain 4x 2GB modules of memory. The current 4GB of RAM will end up in my wife's PC as she is sat with 2GB on an old Asrock 945G E6300 based system which she uses for basic tasks.

My question is this - Will I notice a difference if I upgrade from 4GB to 8GB? The most demanding tasks it gets asked to perform are the odd game now and again (currently playing Arma III :cool: ) as well as Photoshop, Fireworks and Illustrator related work.

Ta.
 
I moved from 8gb to 4gb in my work machine which i use for the full creative suite. 4gb is terrible. So much slower. You will notice a difference going to 8gb especially if ur using photoshop.
 
Good stuff, cheers. I use most of the applications within Creative Suite, PS, FW and iL being the most commonly used ones on this system of mine. Gaming, not really too bothered about and that link you posted, mickyflinn, seems to suggest that anything more than 4GB isn't really needed for gaming.
 
I'd still recommend 8 for gaming, as I've found that the likes of Skyrim and KSP can use up to 3.5GB of RAM on a 64bit OS, and it's rely nice to just leave your background applications in RAM without a horrible amount of paging when you load and quit the game.
 
worthwhile?? essential id say nowadays

isn't ddr2 expensive though? why not hold out and uprade the whole system?
 
I plan to do exactly that but not until later in the year. In the meantime I want to squeeze a little more out of this current rig. With a set of used DDR2 @£50 and a 6950/7850 @£80 I think it's a worthwhile route to go down, given the minimal cost involved at the moment. Then when I go ahead and build the new system later this year, this current PC will be passed to the missus for her to use. :cool:
 
I'm in same boat and stuck with a DDR 2 system - however it never goes over 85% usage even with 64bit games - if I upgraded to 6GB would I see any benefit? Will it use more in games because more is available?
 
Devboy said:
would anyone reccomend going from 8gb to 16gb. only game on my machine.
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Depends how long you envisage using your rig for / what you migth want to use in the future.

Just bare in mind that the bigger sticks are harder to get the same overclock out of than smaller sticks (ie 2*2GB is usually easier to overclock than 2*4GB and same again 2*8GB, and this also holds true for more sticks ie 4*4GB sticks)

While its not strictly connected, Ive also bought more system ram when ive been using bigger displays / better video cards and I have 16GB currently, which Im more than happy with alongside my i5, 7970 and 30" Dell (I also upgrade about 1/3 as much as most on here lol)
 
OP: if you use Photoshop, absolutely feed it more memory. I'm not sure I'd consider 8GB enough, but it's far and away better than 4. Even basics like rotates or gaussian blurs on a large image will suddenly be a lot faster :)


n111ck said:
I'm in same boat and stuck with a DDR 2 system - however it never goes over 85% usage even with 64bit games - if I upgraded to 6GB would I see any benefit? Will it use more in games because more is available?
Click to expand...

I've found it nearly impossible to get Windows 7 to use more than ~82% of memory for any length of time - however watching the size of a dynamic page file showed up that it was just dumping loads to virtual memory. Windows itself seems to like to keep the top 20% in reserve for the next thing that opens. Silly behaviour I feel, when my foreground program is clearly thrashing around the hard drive and yet a chunk of RAM is going unused.

And if the game itself doesn't use it, then Windows can avoid having to write background applications to disk, so there won't be a big clunk and pause when you quit :)
 
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