G+_William Burlingame Posted October 3, 2014 Share Posted October 3, 2014 Regarding the benchmarks in episode 113. Why does increasing RAM to 32 GB give a poorer performance boost than increasing RAM to 16 GB? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Phillip Adcock Posted October 3, 2014 Share Posted October 3, 2014 As noted in the show, it's random access memory, above 16gb the computer takes to long searching the index. It just so happens that 16gb is the sweet spot of ram to speed ratio. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Xenos Teh Posted October 3, 2014 Share Posted October 3, 2014 But this is only true as long as you don't max out the 16GB RAM, right? If you're doing something that causes the page file to be used even with 16GB RAM then it's beneficial to upgrade to 32GB? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_William Burlingame Posted October 4, 2014 Author Share Posted October 4, 2014 Seems like it would depend on how you use your computer. If you're a gamer, you are primarily running a single application. If you're doing video editing, have a lot of browser tabs open at the same time and have other applications running, it would seem like the more memory you have the better. It would save a lot of swapping with a drive. I currently have 50+ tabs open in Chrome, an app monitoring and recording detected motion for eight security cameras, VirtualBox, with a Linux and Win 10 preview VM, Team Viewer, One Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Transporter to mention a few of the things that are running. That is rather typical. I'm not maxed out on 16 GB, but I could see users maxing out 16 GB. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Phillip Adcock Posted October 4, 2014 Share Posted October 4, 2014 My understanding is that past 16gb, it begins to slow the performance of the ram, not drastically but by benchmarks as it's spending to much time indexing. 16gb in my understanding is the sweet spot between memory and speed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Tyger Posted October 4, 2014 Share Posted October 4, 2014 There are multiple possible reasons why adding more RAM would slow a system. 1. Some motherboards can only handle a certain amount of RAM chips at it's fastest clock speed because of bandwidth limitations. If you go over that threshold, the motherboard down clocks the RAM to provided the bandwidth it needs for all of the chips. Ex. Lets say the motherboard can support 40GB/sec bandwidth with RAM. Then you have 2 sticks of RAM that push 15GB/sec each when they are running at full speed. So the pair of them push 30/sec. Say you add two more identical sticks of RAM. Now if all of the sticks ran at full speed they'd need 60GB/sec of bandwidth. The motherboard can't provide that much bandwidth. So the motherboard slows all of chips so they can all run within the 40GB/sec bandwidth. 2. The extra chips may have disabled dual (or triple) channeling. Depending on how your total RAM size is distributed across the chips, adding extra memory may have made the setup non-compliant dual channel or triple channeling. ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Posted October 7, 2014 Share Posted October 7, 2014 Memory is possibly one of the most difficult things to benchmark because, as Phillip Adcock, Xenos Teh & William Burlingame have pointed out, unless you've got a small enough installed memory base to warrant a lot of paging, you probably won't notice the boost. What we've learned is that it's not a one-size fits all upgrade. -- More memory is generally better if you're doing video editing/multimedia work... but if it's a office suite/web surfing/movie watching/gaming box... probably not needed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Xenos Teh Posted October 7, 2014 Share Posted October 7, 2014 So basically what you're saying Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ is that we should add only as much RAM as we need. Anything beyond that starts becoming diminishing returns? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Posted October 7, 2014 Share Posted October 7, 2014 Xenos Teh Yuuup.... 16GB with 2 x 8GB sticks seems to be the sweet spot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Xenos Teh Posted October 7, 2014 Share Posted October 7, 2014 Just out of curiosity Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ. I'm running 4 x 4 GB and I'm pretty sure my motherboard runs dual channel. This was a couple of years ago before 8 GB sticks were available or financially feasible. Do you think I should change to 2 X 8 GB or would there be no difference? Assuming all other variables were unchanged. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Posted October 7, 2014 Share Posted October 7, 2014 I dunno... too many variables. :( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_John Mink Posted October 14, 2014 Share Posted October 14, 2014 Xenos Teh I can't imagine any benefit you might see would be worth changing but when memory eventually dies shrug up to you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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