Its astounding

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bru

bru

bru

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Ive just been reading thought the various forums and i noticed something that i found quite astounding.

Go read the CPU forums and it seems that faster is always better generally recommended, the only point that seems to be different to this is the 2500k vrs 2600k where the due to the price difference and very little performance difference the 2500k is normally the one to be recommended.

Go read the GPU forum and their is a growing debate that more video ram is better.

where as here on the memory forum when people suggest more than 8GB of ram they get shot down in flames for being stupid, so why in this enthusiast forum is less memory considered better than more.
 
bru said:
where as here on the memory forum when people suggest more than 8GB of ram they get shot down in flames for being stupid, so why in this enthusiast forum is less memory considered better than more.
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It's just that for the vast majority of PC users more than 8GB of RAM offers no benefit.

For a large number 4GB is enough.

Why pay for what you aren't going to use?
 
As said, for most people like gamers, 4GB is generally enough. The trade off with having more RAM is that you usually have to run it a slower timings, which is all well and good if you need more RAM as it'll prevent disc caching which is orders of magnitude slower, but if you don't you just end up with slower RAM that you don't make full use of.
 
More VRAM is better upto a point, same as physical memory - you won't find many people reccomending silly high levels of VRAM (the cards don't generally exist anyhow).
 
Surveyor said:
It's just that for the vast majority of PC users more than 8GB of RAM offers no benefit.

For a large number 4GB is enough.

Why pay for what you aren't going to use?
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For most people, 1 Gb Vram is plenty enough too. But you see so many whining that it isnt.

The thing with ram is that 4 Gb modules are so cheap now, so just about anyone can get 8+ Gb installed into their systems.

With graphics cards, by the time people will need 2 Gb cards for mainstream titles, the current generation will be far too slow, so I consider obsessing over more than 1 Gb of Vram at this point to be ridiculous.

If people want 2 Gb video cards, both the 6950 and 6970 have those options. Its only Nvidia who dont have many 2 Gb vram options atm, and it really isnt too important anyway.

The majority of video games are still 32 bit too, meaning that they cant use more that 3 Gb ram (4 Gb ram = 3 Gb for games, 1 Gb for OS and anything in the background, still perfectly adequate for playing 32 bit games).

Though I do find it astounding why several people are trying to tell others to buy graphics cards with more than 1 Gb Vram when it would make absolutely no difference to them, it would be similar to telling them to get 16-24 Gb of ram for video games too.
 
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yes OK but you could just a well say most people don't need a 4.6GHz i5 and yet the 2500k is the one that is suggested more often than not. here buy the 500GB hard disk because not many actually need the 1 or 2 TB drives.
just the whole don't buy more memory attitude of the forum really shocked me considering everything else is about as much excess as possible.

just thought of another is there any real noticeable difference in everyday usage between say an vertex 1 120GB drive and the vertex 3 120GB and yet hardly anyone would suggest the older drive.
 
When buying brand new its better to get the latest suff, but ram size tends to be insignifant over CPU and GPU speeds / architecture.

The 2500k makes a far bigger impact on gaming than more ram does, and it has the price / performance crown of all the CPUs currently available, thats why people buy it.

Its actually cheaper, and performs better than an X58 setup would do anymore.
 
Actually people who don't recommended more ram for their PCs are usually gamers. Everyone else using their PC all day will benefit pretty quickly from more ram.

The system caches disk blocks in free ram, so the longer you use it, the bigger the cache get, until at some point pretty much everything you use is in the cache. That means near zero disk activity.

Of course, again, player who use their PC like a console won't care about that.

Just upgraded my linux box to 16GB in fact, at £52 Corsair/Vengeance kit, and two free slots, /why not/ ? Also my machine stays up 24/7 so the boost in performance for disk related stuff is amazing pretty quickly.
 
bru said:
yes OK but you could just a well say most people don't need a 4.6GHz i5 and yet the 2500k is the one that is suggested more often than not. here buy the 500GB hard disk because not many actually need the 1 or 2 TB drives.
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That is kind of missing the point. Saying buy a 500gb hdd because you might not use 1tb isnt the same at all as saying buy 8gb of ram as you cannot physically benefit from more when using the pc for what you intend to use it for. Might not and cannot are very different beasts....
 
BusError said:
Actually people who don't recommended more ram for their PCs are usually gamers. Everyone else using their PC all day will benefit pretty quickly from more ram.

The system caches disk blocks in free ram, so the longer you use it, the bigger the cache get, until at some point pretty much everything you use is in the cache. That means near zero disk activity.

Of course, again, player who use their PC like a console won't care about that.
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well this was my understanding, so basically anyone who actually uses their pc will gain a benifit unless all you do is boot up, start game, play, shut down
 
bru said:
well this was my understanding, so basically anyone who actually uses their pc will gain a benifit unless all you do is boot up, start game, play, shut down
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Not really, whilst Windows 7 does use memory for a cache, it's not going to fill up 16-24GB of RAM, the main issue is most of the people asking if they should upgrade to 16GB or more of RAM don't do anything that actually requires that sort of memory and are purely doing it because it's cheap or for bragging rights.

People who do actually need that amount of RAM don't need to ask because they already know they are hitting the limit of their currently installed RAM.
 
Ok first of all there is difference between speed and capacity.
A faster cpu gives better performance in demanding applications, an increase in RAM capacity does not (unless you are running low).

As for the VRAM thing, that is a bit different because there are genuine cases where >1GB VRAM gives you performance gains in games. Whereas >8GB system memory doesn't make any games faster to my knowledge.

Of course, there are other gains to be had from large amount of VRAM, typically for multi-tasking, video editing, superfetch, RAMdisks etc.
 
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