'Out of memory' issues when gaming - buy 2x8GB DDR3, or just two more 4GB?

[hughtrimble]

Evening all,

I'm having lots of 'out of memory' issues when attempting to play ARMA 3, Rust, DayZ, and it seems I may need to increase the amount of RAM I have?

Current mobo: Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H Motherboard (https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...cket-1150-ddr3-atx-motherboard-mb-446-gi.html)
Current RAM: TeamGroup Vulcan GOLD 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-19200C11 2400MHz Dual Channel Kit (TLYD38G2400HC11CDC01) (https://www.overclockers.co.uk/team...nnel-kit-tlred38g2400hc11cdc01-my-061-tg.html)

So should I buy 2x8GB sticks of RAM and flog my current sticks, or just buy two more of the same sticks? This is purely for gaming, and I'm not a benchmarker.

Any suggestions at all would be much appreciated.

Hugh

 

[hughtrimble]

Sounds like you have turned the Windows page file off, turn it back on. I would still upgrade to 16GB RAM. 2 * 8GB will give the same performance as 4*4GB.

Nope, page file is on 'Automatically manage paging file size for all drives'.

 

[hughtrimble]

Might this be an issue as I use SSDs? Seen something about issues with repetitive and frequent writing on SSDs due to the nature of the page file.

 

[hughtrimble]

When the issues occur you need to access resource monitor and see what memory usage is, it's the graph at the bottom with hardware reserved etc your looking for.

I cleared a bunch of stuff from my primary SSD (the one with the OS on it) and it hasn't happened since.

I'm monitoring the memory useage at the moment though whilst on ARMA 3 (thank you kindly for the suggestion of Resource Monitor), and the hard faults/sec is often reading as 100 (I'm thinking it must be higher than that as the line looks to be peaking well above that given the apparent plateau in the graph). Must be badgiven the graph scale ends at 100?

Any pointers on whether to use 2x8GB or 4x4GB sticks though?

 

[hughtrimble]

The Killer Network can cause issues - i would get out of memory messages with 16gb of ram.

https://www.tenforums.com/performance-maintenance/37898-memory-problem.html

Also try the below - my value was 2 and 4 fixed it- i have a Gigabyte mobo also
Open up "regedit" and go this key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Ndu

Change the "Start" value to 4 (to disable it).

Thank you for this m4rmite - I've had a look in the processes list and can find no 'killer network' label anywhere. Is this peculiar?

 

[hughtrimble]

ok forgive me - i saw Gigabyte and thought your mobo had the Killer Network, just checked and its an Intel one.

Have you checked your settings in regedit?

Just done so - it's 2. What does changing that to 4 do, as in what does that mean?

 

[hughtrimble]

You need to report the actual memory useage however.

Sounds like your c drive was full and page file could no increase.

2 * 8 or 4 * 4 makes little to no difference. I personally prefer to populate all empty slots with the sane memory but its just a personal preference.

Kingston makes some of the most reliable memory.

Thank you for this. I was watching the memory usage, and it peaked at around 98% on Rust, but on Arma 3 was sitting around the 80% mark.

Regarding the memory, I've just bought two more of the same RAM sticks to go 4x4GB, but I see it's described as 'dual channel memory kit'. Does this mean I cannot use four of them, and must buy a quad channel kit?

 

[hughtrimble]

You will be totally fine putting those 2 sticks of memory you have purchased with your existing memory.

JasonM, thank you kindly. I'd read something about 4 sticks putting stress on the memory controller? Anything I can do to minimise the stress?

 

[hughtrimble]

Shouldn't really be maxing out 8GB unless you have a ton of stuff running in the background or some kind of memory allocation issue.

Can't remember if its the same for Windows 10 but go to task manager->performance->resource monitor and make sure you don't have like several GB allocated to hardware reserve or something.

Might also be worth using custom settings for the pagefile and setting Initial size to 1024MB and Maximum size to something like 8192-16384MB and see if that helps.

Currently have 1073MB hardware reserved, 2717MB in use (two Chrome windows open and resource monitor on), 31MB modified, 1665MB standby, and 2716MB free. Anything seem odd about that?

I'll give the custom pagefile settings a try if the problems return.

 

[hughtrimble]

Hardware reserved is a bit high - on most systems I've used its in the range of 50-200MB.

I agree hardware reserved is a little high.

Do you have the onboard graphics controller enabled?

No nothing you can do to minimize load on controller with 4 memory SIMMS but it's that minor it's totally nothing to worry about, I have 6 computers in my house with all there memory slots populated.

Thank you for the info on the load - good to know.

And I do indeed have it enabled - needed it to run a fourth screen (three coming from GPU, the final - mirroring one of the GPU-driven screens - needed the onboard graphics enabled).

With 16GB, I assume having that much hardware reserved RAM isn't an issue?

 

[hughtrimble]

If that hardware reserve amount is indeed due to the onboard then moving to 16GB should help to offset that. Having that few extra 100MB tied up there is probably making the difference between having enough RAM and not - your available RAM is pretty close to what some more demanding games might utilise.

Cheers Rroff - hopefully once the extra RAM has arrived from OCUK these issues will disappear entirely!

The hardware reserved still appears a little high even for on-board graphics. Do you have on-board graphics set to reserve full amount of memory, I expect the full amount is 1 GB.

If your 4th screen is only used for 2D work I would be surprised if you even needed more then 512MB, thats unless it's like a modern 4k screen that will need the 1GB.

I honestly don't know how much it's set to - I'll check that out. It's very much not a modern screen! Pre-1080p even.