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1gb System Memory - Does it actually help for a workstation?

S

sackowitz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 26, 2002
Messages
328
I was having a discussion with a friend about system memory. He feels that a gig of system memory will make a workstation run faster / use the pagefile less, on a system primarily used for gaming.

Having monitored my memory usage with 512mb system memory, I find that around half of it goes completely untouched during normal usage playing games, using autoCAD, photoshop, pinnacle's video editing, etc, running win2kpro, even when you run several programs at once.

Obviously servers that parse huge databases and run programs for multiple workstations over a network should have a gig of ram on the average. But for a workstation that browses & plays games primarily, from what I've seen the extra memory is never touched and thus wasted.

does anyone have claims of any substance that would tell me otherwise? If you know of some reason or situation a workstation for the above purposes could benefit from the extra system memory, please, do tell. Thanks in advance
 
This basic topic has been discussed in various fashions. Check out this thread. http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=707368

Basically it's talking about how to size a page file vs. RAM requirements. In there I discuss how to determine how much RAM you are using. If you are using more than you have in physical RAM your machine would benefit from additional memory.

That being said, in general, the apps you mentioned would benefit from 1gb. But if you have Photoshop only to edit 100k images, 1GB isn't necessary. The biggest RAM using apps, in general, are games, DBs, and video/photo editing.
 
depends what you are going to do with that desktop.

if you are only going to surf the web, use email, and use Word, then no, it doesn't matter one bit, you could do that without any problems with a P2 400 and 64 megs of memory.

if you are going to be gaming, video editing, or photo editing, then the workstation will eat ram like a fat kid at a candy bowl.

In general more ram won't hurt anything and yes, it will use the page file less. Which is a very good thing in terms of speed.

Of course in the ideal world you would have enough ram to load everything into the registers on the cpu but that isn't a feasible option so we use L1 cache, well there isn't enough of that either, so we use L2 cache, well guess what, that is very expensive too (P4EE/Xeon) then we may use L3 cache ect ect....

The bottom line is that we must wage price vs speed and that is where we get RAM vs Disk.

You don't see RAM selling for $.75 GB so that is why we see HDs
 
if you seriously cant tell the difference between 512 and 1 gig, youre using the computer wrong or something. i notice a huge difference. theres no way you played games and edited video and didnt completly use all 512 megs.
 
I went from 512mb to 1gb and the difference was like night and day for me. I noticed it most in farcry and windows seems to run happier now :)
 
If your a gamer...it definitely does make a HUGE difference. Last night, I checked my mem usage during a Desert Combat game...~700 MBs.
 
....another member of the gig club checking in.

A gig at work, a gig in my #1 rig (sig), and a gig in the P4 / 865 I recently built for the wife. Pretty standard anymore for machines I build where performance is a consideration.

With XP, most everything "seems" to run lots smoother with a gig than with 512. Recent games really show the difference.

FWIW - B.B.S.
 
I have to chime in here. A gig of memory is the way to rock the casba. Sure sitting around right now I have like 750meg of memory free. But that all changes when the games start playing. :)
 
I wish I had more than 512MB on my work machine. What with programming, db development, help files, e-mail, etc. it pretty much drags ass...
 
I noticed a difference on my Dell workstations. Day and night differences.
 
umm 512 sounds good to me(im only using 256 im my computer now;) ). i highly doubt 512 to 1gig is much of difference in performance. I have 512 on my other computer and it hardly ever used more than 400.

edit: well i guess that doesn't show much because im kind of about 2 or 3 years behind everyone else when it comes to hardware and games. Hey i get my stuff dirt cheap. lol look at my graphics card for crying out loud. im getting a blazing MX 440 64mb soon for $47. It's going to be sweet
 
I am planning on buying another stick of 512MB PC3700 RAM. It will be a total of a gig of ram, and I use VMware and games like Farcry. Farcry runs like shit on 512MB of ram and a radeon 9700Pro.
 
1 GB is a dream if you game and use a lot of memory crunching applications. Was just playing BF1942 on 512 RAM (the other 512 stick is dead, so no dual channel and no gig!), it went through the remaining 420 megs of my system with the game loaded.

On a 256 system, ouch, performance takes a hit for me (because of the need to page to disk).

If you can afford it, a gig is good if you do things like 3D, CAD, video editing, etc., which is what I assume the workstation is for.
 
what tools are you guys using to check your memory usage? i was told that the one in task manager in 2k / xp is pretty accurate... and my commit charge usually peaks around 350mb with what games i play.

i guess proof is in the pudding... i stand corrected. thank you for the link to the thread concerning swapfiles, thats very useful.

i just figured that if a game will install off 750mb and you're only loading 1 map at a time, i couldnt imagine using more than 512 on any given game. if i should be using different software to verify memory usage, please let me know. otherwise, thanks for your replies fellas ;)
 
Task manager does it's job just fine, I have seen little need to use an alternate program.
 
If you're running Windows 98 or later (up to and including XP and 2003), add "ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1" under the "[386enh]" header of your system.ini file. It will make windows use the pagefile as little as possible, i.e. only when your ram fills up. With this, you can set your pagefile to 2-x MB, where x equals your total amount of ram. You can always set it to less, but...

Through experimentation, I found a quirk in the hibernation feature of XP - at least, for me. If your maximum pagefile size is set to less than the total amount of memory being used when you hibernate, the hibernation process will fail, and you will not be able to issue a hibernation command until after you reboot. If you're using 500mb of memory when you hibernate, and your pagefile is less than that, you will get such an error. For this reason, I set my maximum pagefile size to something realistic.

Remember I've only found this to happen on my computer. YMMV all the way.
 
Well, like they say, 512MB is great, but 1 GB is better....

Basically, if you can afford it, get as much RAM as you can possibly fit in your system, because even if you don't think you're going to be using it now, a year or two down the road you'll be glad you have it. Besides, it's soooo sweet to say you've got 1GB of RAM now.

Course, in a couple of years, 1GB will be standard and the POWER stations will come with 4GB.
 
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