I Just Ordered 32 GB of RAM

RJM62

RJM62

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Geek on the Hill
The first computer I ever owned was a TRS-80 that came with 4K of RAM. I later upgraded it to 16K -- as much as it could handle -- and was briefly considered the geek equivalent of a stud. I couldn't imagine that I would ever need more than 16K of RAM.

The most powerful computer I ever built for its time was built around a Pentium III processor and sported 256 MB of RAM, which was an enormous amount of RAM for a desktop computer in its day (early 1999, a few weeks after the P-III was released), and was the max that its very expensive motherboard could handle. I couldn't imagine that I would ever need more than 256 MB of RAM.

When AMD introduced the Athlon 64, I built a computer around one. I equipped it with a whopping 4 GB of RAM. It could handle more than that (16 GB, I think), but I couldn't imagine that I would ever need more than 4 GB.

Today, I was noticing that my HP ProDesk 400 G3 MT desktop computer was a bit sluggish. It has an Intel i5 6600 and 8 GB of RAM, which was its stock configuration. I checked the Task Manager and was flummoxed to learn that I was actually running out of RAM! How in the world can you possibly run out of RAM with 8 GB installed?

Okay, granted, I was running DreamWeaver, Fireworks, Premiere Pro, and two Web browsers at the time, and Thunderbird was doing its "compacting" thing because I'd deleted some attachments that I was done with. But still, 8 GB. When I bought the computer, I never thought that 8 GB wouldn't be enough, otherwise I would have bought more RAM at the same time.

I looked up the RAM capacity on the mobo and found that it could handle as much as 32 GB. So I ordered it from Amazon. They had Crucial RAM on sale for $109.99 for two 16GB sticks, which was less than Micro Center wanted for the same RAM. Plus it saved me the nearly three-hour drive each way, plus the gas and tolls. Thanks to Prime, I should have it Thursday.

I expect that it will make a big difference. After all, I can't imagine that I'll ever need more than 32 GB of RAM...

Rich
 
I currently manage a vmware farm, and one of our clusters has 5.19 TB of RAM... Never thought i'd see that. I'm sure its small beans by some other companies, but still pretty significant.
 
Sac Arrow said:
Are you using an SSD? Probably the biggest bang for your buck, performance wise.
Click to expand...

No, not yet. I'm undecided on how much it would help. I/O isn't a big problem for me. I usually only have a few files open at any given time. They're just huge files that I spend a lot of time editing, so they're sitting in RAM. It's when I start pushing the RAM envelope that I start running into sluggishness, presumably from the paging.

I also briefly considered making the trip to Micro Center to buy an i7-6700 processor that they have on sale for $299.99. But really, I don't think that would make much difference at all for the work I do. Well, maybe for the video editing it would, but that's just an occasional thing. The i5 does quite nicely for everything else.

Most likely I'll just upgrade the RAM, run as much stuff as I can to test it out, and then take it from there. I'm pretty sure that the RAM is where my bottleneck is. But then again, you never know. The day's not over yet, there's money on my E-Z Pass, my car has a full tank of gas, and Micro Center is open until 9:00 tonight; so anything's possible. :D

Rich
 
you are the rammeister general.
 
Rich, I installed a Samsung SSD in my nine year old desktop and it improved performance considerably. 4G of RAM is all I can cram in there but it does all I need it to do.
 
Norman said:
Rich, I installed a Samsung SSD in my nine year old desktop and it improved performance considerably. 4G of RAM is all I can cram in there but it does all I need it to do.
Click to expand...

Like I said, it's not out of the running.

Rich
 
I have the 950 Pro SSD and it's night and day different than a traditional hard drive.
 
Another vote for ssd. I boot to Ubuntu Linux and run Windows 10 and xp under a vBox VM, and all boot up almost instantaneously after adding the ssd. i5 processor with 8g ram
 
I have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with an i7 8gb of ram and an SSD and it boots up and runs really, really fast. I've only had it for a week and I don't think I could go back to my old computer with a standard hard drive.
 
kgruber said:
It will help about 10 times more than 32G RAM. It will waken the beast.
Click to expand...

Chip Sylverne said:
Another vote for ssd. I boot to Ubuntu Linux and run Windows 10 and xp under a vBox VM, and all boot up almost instantaneously after adding the ssd. i5 processor with 8g ram
Click to expand...

The 32 GB of RAM may have been a bit extreme. But I've never experienced any problems caused by having too much RAM, and the price was good.

Frankly, even today was a bit unusual. In addition to all the other stuff that's always open (DW, Fireworks, etc.), I also had almost 5 GB of video open that I was whittling down into a 140 MB file. You might say that it was heavily-edited. Once I closed Premiere Pro (which is a bit of a RAM hog itself), the computer returned to its usual snappiness.

As for SSDs, I know they're fast. I'm also noticing that the prices have come down a lot. Enough, in fact, that I'm getting tempted. I'd need two of them because I do keep a clone as well as an image backup, and I'd want the clone to also be an SSD if I upgrade the system drive. And at the prices I'm looking at, I must admit that it's a lot more tempting than it was a few months ago.

But first I have to do some math and be able to calculate a sufficient productivity improvement to justify the purchase. It's not that I have to answer to anyone. It would just help me feel better about coughing up the money. :p

Rich
 
Keep an eye on New Egg daily deals. I got a 500gb mSATA for $106. I thought that was pretty cheap.
 
Mmmmmm computer upgrades. I'm wanting to get a gtx 1080 then of course new ddr4 ram a new mobo a SSD and 4k monitor maybe a 2nd gtx for SLI maybe a 2nd monitor..... Everytime I start looking to upgrade feature creep kicks in and a simple gfx card turns into new system. Kind of like my plane browsing habits. Start off looking at a 140 end up trying to justify a Malibu.
 
AggieMike's Law of Persoal Computers -- The faster we make the computers, the more impatient the users become.

That TRS 80 took a while to do certain tasks. Now, of that same task isn't done in 0.5 seconds, we're not a happy user.
 
Chip Sylverne said:
Keep an eye on New Egg daily deals. I got a 500gb mSATA for $106. I thought that was pretty cheap.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, I can't make purchases from New Egg. They use UPS or FedEx to ship, but they use the USPS Address Verification System. When I enter my physical address for delivery, the AVS corrects the address by adding the PO Box as the second address line (because we don't have carrier route mail delivery here in Sparrow Fart). That correction, in turn, causes New Egg's system to vomit because UPS or FedEx technically can't deliver to PO boxes (they actually do it all the time here, but don't tell anyone), and New Egg's system will not simply ignore the second address line.

This AVS failure problem is not unique to New Egg. I usually get an AVS failure the first time I order from any vendor that uses UPS or FedEx. What is unique to New Egg is that they have no way to override a failure. Most other companies either let me override the failure myself at checkout ("Ship to this address anyway"), or they issue either a one-time or a permanent override if I call them on the phone.

But not New Egg. If your address fails verification, then you can't order from them. Period.

Micro Center will issue overrides per-order. I have to fill the cart, submit it, let it fail AVS, and then call them in Ohio with the cart number. They override it from there and ship it out. But Micro Center is a bit odd in that their physical stores are better-stocked than their online store. That's why I usually wind up making the drive down to either the Yonkers or the Paterson store. It's rare that every item I want is available through the Web store.

Amazon let me override the failure myself the first time I ordered something while at this address, and then made the override permanent when I received the first package.

PayPal / eBay (they were the same company then) asked for a note from the Postmaster. When they received it, they listed both both the physical and PO box addresses as verified.

Financial institutions used to barf on the PO box, but more recently they don't. I don't know why.

The FAA doesn't like PO boxes, but allows them if you provide the reason as "No carrier route delivery available at this address." They don't ask for proof.

The DMV online system also gets stuck in an AVS loop. The only way to change the address on your driver's license if you live in Sparrow Fart is in person. Fortunately, our DMV office does maybe a dozen transactions a day, so it's no biggie.

Rich
 
8 gigs of RAM and 500gb SSD. I'm probably upgrading to 64gb RAM in the future. That processor is the weak link
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Last edited:
1978?
400$
trs-80 hand held
learned basic
now filled with my amortization programs, and
my greatest!! My Celestial Navigation program!

1.9 K ram!

Heck,, ive got 64 gig in my phablet

Weve come a long way baby!!
 
My work laptop has an Intel i5 quad core in it but the IT dept only deploys it with 4 GB of RAM. We've always complained to them that our laptops were sluggish, they weren't any good.

I used the Resource Monitor in windows to record the fact that my computer was using just 2 of the 4 CPUs and those never exceeded 15%. Why? Because the disk was constantly thrashing and swapping out memory. Page Faults were climbing fast enough that you could watch the numbers go up. After fighting with IT for 3 months about more memory, I finally gave up and bought myself a 8GB chip for $85 and installed it. Problem solved, I'm suddenly using all 4 CPUs at 40-70% and performance is pretty darn nice. I did a write up of the before and after, sent it to the lady in charge of laptop deployment with an explanation of why she keeps getting beat up on laptop performance. Six months later suddenly everyone was getting memory added.

Moore's law proposes that hardware performance doubles roughly every 18 months. So why isn't everyone's computer a screaming banshee by now? I propose that Eroom's law (that's moore backwards) says that every 18 months, the needs of the OS and other software also double.
 
I have a Samsung SSD which greatly improved system response. But one other thing I believe no one has mentioned here, is that the Samsung software can, if enabled, make use of unused RAM making a RAMdisk and speeding up disk operations even more. So that extra RAM may actually get used this way. Just a thought.

David
 
bflynn said:
My work laptop has an Intel i5 quad core in it but the IT dept only deploys it with 4 GB of RAM. We've always complained to them that our laptops were sluggish, they weren't any good.

I used the Resource Monitor in windows to record the fact that my computer was using just 2 of the 4 CPUs and those never exceeded 15%. Why? Because the disk was constantly thrashing and swapping out memory. Page Faults were climbing fast enough that you could watch the numbers go up. After fighting with IT for 3 months about more memory, I finally gave up and bought myself a 8GB chip for $85 and installed it. Problem solved, I'm suddenly using all 4 CPUs at 40-70% and performance is pretty darn nice. I did a write up of the before and after, sent it to the lady in charge of laptop deployment with an explanation of why she keeps getting beat up on laptop performance. Six months later suddenly everyone was getting memory added.

Moore's law proposes that hardware performance doubles roughly every 18 months. So why isn't everyone's computer a screaming banshee by now? I propose that Eroom's law (that's moore backwards) says that every 18 months, the needs of the OS and other software also double.
Click to expand...

That curve is starting to flatten out. I'm pretty sure that Moore revised his predictions to every two years some time back, and Intel puts it at 30 months. At some point there must be a terminus based on the physical characteristics of the materials used to make chips that will end the advancement of how much performance can be squeezed out of a core. At that point, I suppose that any further advances will require either finding new materials, adding more cores, or writing more efficient instruction sets.

What doesn't seem to be flattening out are the things we expect computers to be able to do, and the verbosity (and frankly, inefficiency in many cases) of code, both in the OS and applications. Add to that bloat caused by malware, spyware, crapware, and snoopware, and the hope of every computer becoming a screaming banshee starts seeming not closer, but ever more remote.

My current computers can do many orders of magnitude more things than computers of as little as 15 years ago could, but there's not that much of a subjective difference in terms of responsiveness to user input. The machine I built on a 32-bit P-III with 256 MB of RAM and running Windows NT (and later Win2K) didn't subjectively "feel" very different than a current high-end machine running Win10 on a 64-bit i5 or i7. The responsiveness of the old machine was lightning-fast. But it couldn't do the kinds of things that we routinely do nowadays.

(I did find myself on Micro Center's site looking at SSDs this morning, however...)

Rich
 
My point was not the value of Moore's law, it was the explanation that no matter how fast the computers get, OS and programs will grow to expand that speed. Faster CPUs do very little for the consumer.
 
bflynn said:
My point was not the value of Moore's law, it was the explanation that no matter how fast the computers get, OS and programs will grow to expand that speed. Faster CPUs do very little for the consumer.
Click to expand...

Understood and agreed.

Rich
 
I felt much the same about the performance of then vs now - that it seems as quickly as the power sped up the OS sucked it up so it was always relative. Then I saw that video posted on her about Win98 on an SSD, and couldn't believe how slow the OS loaded. That would never be tolerable by todays standards, so I think our machines are in fact much faster today - we've just gotten used to it or come to expect it.
 
Rich, I'm behind on my PoA reading but I'll add to the chorus of folks saying to do the SSD.

I was a fairly late adopter of those on personal machines but within a couple of weeks of doing my MacBook, I couldn't stand the change in performance on the two Minis and did those as well. Been all SSD in all machines now for a while and I wouldn't go back.

Even with gobs of RAM in all of them, the overall responsiveness and speed to do things like boot or reboot saves a ton of time. Even though modern OSs cache the most often used stuff on the filesystem in RAM, most kernels are still relatively paranoid/atomic about those activities and the I/O increases to the "disk" essentially mean you're not waiting on anything other than the native speed of the SATA bus.

I highly recommend the Samsung stuff - their Vertical NAND tech is still proprietary, I believe and it's wicked fast and they can give better warranties than some competitors. I've had good luck with both their Pro and non-Pro series -- when I bought these the 850 EVO was top o' their heap. I haven't looked to see what they've done as far as new models but for home use, the non-Pro Evos have been excellent. (Info on their product line may be outdated... Just saying the Samsung stuff has been good!)
 
Does Samsung still disable Windows Backup when you install one of their SSDs? That struck me as requiring excessive faith in the reliability of hardware, so I backed that change out when I installed one in my notebook.
 
We put a man on the moon with 64K, but things are different now. I too vote for SSD. It makes a world of difference.
 
denverpilot said:
Rich, I'm behind on my PoA reading but I'll add to the chorus of folks saying to do the SSD.

I was a fairly late adopter of those on personal machines but within a couple of weeks of doing my MacBook, I couldn't stand the change in performance on the two Minis and did those as well. Been all SSD in all machines now for a while and I wouldn't go back.

Even with gobs of RAM in all of them, the overall responsiveness and speed to do things like boot or reboot saves a ton of time. Even though modern OSs cache the most often used stuff on the filesystem in RAM, most kernels are still relatively paranoid/atomic about those activities and the I/O increases to the "disk" essentially mean you're not waiting on anything other than the native speed of the SATA bus.

I highly recommend the Samsung stuff - their Vertical NAND tech is still proprietary, I believe and it's wicked fast and they can give better warranties than some competitors. I've had good luck with both their Pro and non-Pro series -- when I bought these the 850 EVO was top o' their heap. I haven't looked to see what they've done as far as new models but for home use, the non-Pro Evos have been excellent. (Info on their product line may be outdated... Just saying the Samsung stuff has been good!)
Click to expand...

I spoke to someone at MS today about it, actually. I'd heard that an upgrade to an SSD will require non-automatic reactivation, and I wanted to check with the source. The guy from MS says it often does but sometimes doesn't Generally, if the size is the same as the HDD it's replacing, and the old drive is removed after migration, it usually does an automatic reactivation. Otherwise, it may require a call or chat session with MS for them to manually reactivate.

Because I'm passively considering upgrading the processor as well, however, he suggested that I wait until I decide on that because the processor upgrade would definitely require manual reactivation; so I may as well kill two birds with one stone if I decide to do both.

As for Samsung, I've never been unhappy with anything they built. I don't think I've ever had one of their components fail on me.

Rich

EDIT: Just FYI, he also told me that no RAM upgrade should EVER require manual reactivation unless it's done at the same time or within a very short time of some other upgrade that was borderline in terms of triggering one.

That's an interesting little tidbit. I always thought the reactivation algorithm completely ignored RAM. Apparently it doesn't, but just assigns a very small weight to it; so if done with another upgrade that comes close to triggering reactivation, it might just push it over the line.
 
I've run into the MSFT manual reactivation for things -- they've made it so painless (please call this 800 number) with a quick chat to someone in India, and it's done, I barely worry about it anymore.

But you probably know that already... And have reasons not to do it before the processor.

By the way, on Windows machines, definitely install Samsung's tool that goes with their SSDs. There's some options you can do on Windows that you can't do on other systems. Some of the pre-cache stuff is pretty nifty and makes the darn things even faster.
 
RJM62 said:
I spoke to someone at MS today about it, actually. I'd heard that an upgrade to an SSD will require non-automatic reactivation, and I wanted to check with the source. The guy from MS says it often does but sometimes doesn't Generally, if the size is the same as the HDD it's replacing, and the old drive is removed after migration, it usually does an automatic reactivation. Otherwise, it may require a call or chat session with MS for them to manually reactivate.

Because I'm passively considering upgrading the processor as well, however, he suggested that I wait until I decide on that because the processor upgrade would definitely require manual reactivation; so I may as well kill two birds with one stone if I decide to do both.

As for Samsung, I've never been unhappy with anything they built. I don't think I've ever had one of their components fail on me.

Rich

EDIT: Just FYI, he also told me that no RAM upgrade should EVER require manual reactivation unless it's done at the same time or within a very short time of some other upgrade that was borderline in terms of triggering one.

That's an interesting little tidbit. I always thought the reactivation algorithm completely ignored RAM. Apparently it doesn't, but just assigns a very small weight to it; so if done with another upgrade that comes close to triggering reactivation, it might just push it over the line.
Click to expand...

I have reimaged about 1/2 a dozen to SSD (mostly Win 8 and Win 10) and never had to manually reactivate.
 
I've only had to reactivate after changing out the motherboard - never for just a HDD. That said (as mentioned above) the reactivation process is painless.
 
denverpilot said:
I've run into the MSFT manual reactivation for things -- they've made it so painless (please call this 800 number) with a quick chat to someone in India, and it's done, I barely worry about it anymore.

But you probably know that already... And have reasons not to do it before the processor.

By the way, on Windows machines, definitely install Samsung's tool that goes with their SSDs. There's some options you can do on Windows that you can't do on other systems. Some of the pre-cache stuff is pretty nifty and makes the darn things even faster.
Click to expand...

Nate: Would that be the Samsung Magician that is on the disk? I didn't install it but will if it helps.
 
Norman said:
Nate: Would that be the Samsung Magician that is on the disk? I didn't install it but will if it helps.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but I'd grab the most up to date one from Samsung's support site -- never know how old the one on the disk is -- and I can't remember if that thing self-updates.
 
'Just don't want everyone thinking they should go buy some ram... adding extra ram will only improve performance if you are running out of ram. The average user with 8GB will be swimming in ram, and adding extra will have no effect. I'd agree that a SSD will give the best impression of speed to the avg user, especially at boot time.
 
denverpilot said:
Yeah, but I'd grab the most up to date one from Samsung's support site -- never know how old the one on the disk is -- and I can't remember if that thing self-updates.
Click to expand...
Besides disabling Windows Backup, the version of Magician that came with my SSD also disabled the Windows search function. Does the current version still behave that way?
 
Well, the RAM arrived a day early, as my Amazon packages usually do when the use UPS SurePost. So I edited a boring dashcam video (mainly because it was handy) using Premiere Pro. Here's a picture while it was transcoding the AVI sequence to H.264.

ram-upgrade-1.jpg


The actual size of the video files was only about 1.3 GB combined, but Premiere Pro was using about 8.9 GB of RAM to process them. It's a bit of a hog. But it does pretty much anything you could want to do with a video, and I figure I know how to use maybe five percent of its capabilities. Someone who actually know what he's doing can perform miracles with it.

The transcoding took about four minutes. Once I closed Premiere Pro, memory usage dropped to 10 percent. Nice.

Dreamweaver and Fireworks open in about one second if they're still resident in RAM, or three and six seconds respectively if they're not. That doesn't bother me. I rarely close either of those two anyway once I open them, anyway, which is another reason I was running short on RAM. They're pretty memory-hungry, and I use them all the time.

So I'm happy that I did the RAM upgrade. I'll still likely do the SSD and maybe the processor, though.

Rich
 
Palmpilot said:
Besides disabling Windows Backup, the version of Magician that came with my SSD also disabled the Windows search function. Does the current version still behave that way?
Click to expand...

As I recall those were all optional things in the version I was poking at. Unfortunately I never made it to the office today to look at my (mostly ignored) Windows laptop that has it. All Macs here at home and I usually use the MacBook portable instead of that work-provided Dell.

I think the default settings dump the search indexing because they're attempting to minimize writes to the SSD. Never really noticed the Windows Backup piece of it because I never use it on the work laptops.

(Users are told if they want it backed up, copy it to the NAS. Laptops aren't backed up in any meaningful way, they're generally "disposable". Work goes on the NAS or in source control... And if someone really really wants to, I suppose they could image a machine completely, but by the time it dies the model will have changed hardware and it'll be faster to dump a new OS on it from our golden images than to restore theirs and then figure out what hardware isn't working. So no need for Windows Backup in that environment.)
 
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