4gb v 6gb?

M

MISMCSA

2[H]4U
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Is there a major advantage between 4gb and 6gb, when doing basic computing and gaming?

I'm planning to build and AM3, and currently selecting components. I'm just not sure if I should go for 6gb or 4gb.
 
Depends on what basic and major advantage means to you. If you run software (games) that really takes advantage of multiple cores, if the OS is 64 bit, and so on. If you add some detail about your system, what you run on it, and what you find acceptable you will likely get some good responses.
 
Here's some further description...

- Games I'll be running MW1, MW2, Metro 2033, SC2, ME2, and others as I buy them.
- They will be running on a single monitor 1920x1080 resolution
- Windows 7 64bit home premium.
- Basic computing equates to productivity software packages, digital picture mgmt, recording/watching tv, surfing the net


I can't really classiffy a major advantage, so perhaps those knowledgable could help. Best I can do is say "if there were 4 gig of ram in the computer and it ran the above at x, would 6 gig of ram still make it feel like x, or would it be a noticeable experience difference?
 
for amd you should be thinking 4 or 8. if 8 is not affordable then get 4 and later upgrade to 8
 
jiminator said:
for amd you should be thinking 4 or 8. if 8 is not affordable then get 4 and later upgrade to 8
Click to expand...

This.

DDR3 is fairly cheap of you buy 2x2GB kits, the 2x4GB kits are the more expensive ones. In all honesty though, I can't think of any reason to not go past 4GB. The only thing would be if you are on a tight budget then get 4 now, and get another 4 later on as jiminator said.
 
I was new to building when I built my gaming rig in Spring of '08. I thought that if I put 8 GB of RAM on there I was going to have a really fast PC. I thought windows would load as much of itself as it could into main memory and games, such as Bioshock and Quake 4 would load themselves to the half of their file size on disk.

But, I don't know if the 8 GB is helping. Windows will only load 1 GB of itself into memory. If I run a game than another GB gets loaded. So, I have 8 GB and only 2 GBs gets used. I know that if I only had 2 GBs installed then windows would load only 256 Megs of itself into ram, there would be a lot of virtual memory/Hard disk dependency going on and my games would start pulling level data from the hard drive one quarter of the way through the map!

It makes me wonder why someone would need a Radeon HD 5870 with 2 GB of video RAM -- Is the video game internal operating system really going to load that much frame data into video RAM or is it only going to use a fourth of it?
 
Dubious9 said:
I was new to building when I built my gaming rig in Spring of '08. I thought that if I put 8 GB of RAM on there I was going to have a really fast PC. I thought windows would load as much of itself as it could into main memory and games, such as Bioshock and Quake 4 would load themselves to the half of their file size on disk.

But, I don't know if the 8 GB is helping. Windows will only load 1 GB of itself into memory. If I run a game than another GB gets loaded. So, I have 8 GB and only 2 GBs gets used. I know that if I only had 2 GBs installed then windows would load only 256 Megs of itself into ram, there would be a lot of virtual memory/Hard disk dependency going on and my games would start pulling level data from the hard drive one quarter of the way through the map!

It makes me wonder why someone would need a Radeon HD 5870 with 2 GB of video RAM -- Is the video game internal operating system really going to load that much frame data into video RAM or is it only going to use a fourth of it?
Click to expand...

Video RAM and system RAM are completely different beasts. High res. uncompressed textures take tons of space.
 
When I built my system a few months ago I went with 8gb of ram. This is because I usually have several programs open at once and a VM running full time on my main rig.

I agree with folks above, if you are on a tight budget get 4gb. If the budget is loose, go with the 8gb of ram.
 
If all you plan on doing is gaming 4 should be enough...
Until BF3 comes out and if it was like bf2 was to the s939 generation, a heavy game on memory.

Content Creation/VM's/ Maybe emus? i dont know too much about emus, i think theyre more proc intensive than anything seem to be a bit more intensive on Ram Quantity
 
Dubious9 said:
I was new to building when I built my gaming rig in Spring of '08. I thought that if I put 8 GB of RAM on there I was going to have a really fast PC. I thought windows would load as much of itself as it could into main memory and games, such as Bioshock and Quake 4 would load themselves to the half of their file size on disk.

But, I don't know if the 8 GB is helping. Windows will only load 1 GB of itself into memory. If I run a game than another GB gets loaded. So, I have 8 GB and only 2 GBs gets used. I know that if I only had 2 GBs installed then windows would load only 256 Megs of itself into ram, there would be a lot of virtual memory/Hard disk dependency going on and my games would start pulling level data from the hard drive one quarter of the way through the map!

It makes me wonder why someone would need a Radeon HD 5870 with 2 GB of video RAM -- Is the video game internal operating system really going to load that much frame data into video RAM or is it only going to use a fourth of it?
Click to expand...

Aren't boot times associated with your hard drive not your system RAM? That was my impression. The bottleneck is associated with your hard drive spinning and locating data while a SSD will just pull it right off the memory chips.
 
SSDs boot as instant as you can get. just waiting for capacity to go up and prices down.... :(
 
From reading this thread so far I can see that 4 GB of main memory is about all someone needs if they are just using it for video games.

I think its a good idea to simply wait until SSDs come down in price. Since they became more prevalent a couple years back, they have since increased the cache sizes on them and improved the disk controllers built into them. Now they almost max out 3Gb/300 MB/s SATA. Hence the recent development of 6Gb/600MB/s SATA. If you put 3 275MB/s SSDs into a RAID 0 you can get read speeds of up to nearly a Gigabyte a second!

But, I wanted to share that I found out that you can save money simply using 7200 RPM Hard Disk(s) with a 64 MB cache in RAID. Cache size makes a big difference. I originally RAIDed two 7200 RPM Hard Disks with a 16 MB cache and I get 120 MB/s read speeds. Now, I am building a machine with just a single Hard Disk with a 32 MB cache and it gets 108 MB/s read times by itself!

To the guy choosing between 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM: I hope these posts help guide your decisions. If you get the 8 GBs I'm sure, with a little effort, you can find some way to use all that RAM. I think I am going to try playing with a few Virtual Machines to see if I can get some use out of the extra 6 Gigs I over spent on!
 
Sure sequential reads don't mean much. But, you aren't going to max out the maximum bandwidth of SATA on random access bandwidth. That's mainly where I was going with the details on sequential read rates. As for random read/writes, you have a point. This is the kind of accessing directly affecting the overall experience of running applications on a computer. SSD's are superior to Hard Disks in the random access arena. But I'm telling you I got much better performance out of a lowly Hard Disk because it had a larger cache. Sure the SSD's are nothing short of a secondary storage revolution. But for me, I think Hard Drives with a 32MB or 64 MB cache (in RAID 0) deserve some recognition.
 
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