"...A poll by any other name would smell as sweet as DRAM..."
by Gary Key on April 9, 2009 11:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Gary's First Looks
Now that William Shakespeare is rolling over in his grave due to the hack job on one of his more famous quotes in Romeo and Juliet, we can proceed straight to our poll for today. The first of several DDR2/DDR3 articles arrives shortly and we would like to know your thoughts up front on a variety of subjects surrounding system memory.
We will sidestep sticky questions like what is your favorite and worst memory supplier until later on this month. For today, we would greatly appreciate a response (informed or otherwise) to our three questions. Our first question concerns the primary driving factor that determines why you select a particular memory type or supplier. Personally, I want a quality product that is stable and never once makes me wonder why that BSOD occurred right before saving my article document. I am probably in the minority on this one but it will be interesting to see what you think.
Our second question is a simple one. How much system memory do you have currently? Once again, I am probably in the minority, as I tend to run eight to twelve gigabytes in my personal systems. My family and I tend to multitask a lot - or perhaps we are just too lazy to close multiple applications. Either way, I prefer a responsive system when working or playing and additional memory does tend to help. How much it helps is a question we will answer this month.
The final question is actually very simple. With Vista 64 finally having decent driver support, memory prices near all time lows, applications consuming even greater amounts of memory, and Windows 7 shipping later this year with an emphasis on 64-bit support, do you think it is time to buy more memory. The memory manufacturers are hoping for a resounding yes to this question. I think you can never have enough memory and at today's prices that isn't too difficult to accomplish.
We look forward to your answers and any comments you might have on this subject.
{poll 129:1200}
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faxon - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
I focus primarily on memory stability above all. generally i order most of my components from newegg, despite having to pay sales tax on my orders since i live in california. before buying, i generally look for a product with a TON of reviews, good or bad. even if a product has 1000 bad reviews, if the over all response is "4 egg" or higher it's probably going to end up in my shopping cart. the last kit i got (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... has over 1000 reviews and it has worked wonderfully with the 2x1GB kit of Crucial Ballistix memory i have it paired with for my 6GB total. when i build my quad core rig later this year, if i dont go with DDR3 i will be ordering up another 2 kits of this memory because of how well it is performing, even with my severely underperforming 680i chipset mobo. to put things in perspective, i play a lot of EQ2, and i like to dual box. when im not running CPU limited, 2 copies of the game at 1680x1050 can easily eat through upwards of 6GB of ram. i doubled up my 4gb kit with a friends PI Black kit and a q6600 for a day to get a feel for what i would gain from going to a quad, and i ended up also eating through another 3GB of ram due to not being CPU limited any longer, for a total of 6.9 GB in use with a 512mb log file open on my combat parser, firefox, and ventrilo all runningandreschmidt - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
Mac Pro (Early 2008) with 16GB worth of 800Mhz FB-DIMMs (DDR2).All from Kingston.
Currently I have enough ram but could see myself upgrading to 4GB DIMMs if the price is right (32GB). However, I might as well buy a new Mac Pro when the need arises down the road, which would eventually mean DDR3.
Postoasted - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
I have 6 gigs of RAM in my xp64 PC and sometimes because of some of the software I'm running I run out of available RAM. When I'm downloading something using BT and the download rate is at my MAX (1.5mb/s)RAM usage goes way up. Sometimes it gets so bad that I have to close the browser and stop whatever else I'm doing. One time I was burning a DVD, browsing the web and had my BT client going full blast. My RAM got maxed out and the PC slowed to a crawl. This is on a machine that has a duel-core CPU clocked at 3.2ghz. I know that I should have enough RAM for what I do on my computer, but for some reason some programs just hog RAM and won't release it unless you turn the program off. That sucks.Hrel - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
slowdown was most likely from what cd you were burning; try using a lighter torrent like utorrent; also, XP64bit has VERY limited compatibility.Postoasted - Saturday, April 11, 2009 - link
I don't play games but occasionally dabble in video conversion. XP64 does everything I need to do on a PC.The0ne - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
User a better programmed client for your bit torrent needs. Something like utorrent is good. So when your system crawls, go to task manager and look at what's using your RAM and replace the programs with, again, better programmed ones.Postoasted - Saturday, April 11, 2009 - link
The task manager doesn't show what's eating up the ram. I've heard that this is called memory leakage.BikeDude - Sunday, April 12, 2009 - link
Add the "VM Size" column, and I bet you will see which process eats your memory...!Each 32-bit process has a 4GB virtual memory space available to it, and for some reason Task Manager doesn't show how much virtual memory a process has allocated. Well, the reason is probably that most of the VM is usually backed by the paging file, so only a limited amount of physical memory is in play even though a process can allocate quite a lot of virtual memory.
But to detect a memory leak, you have to look at how much VM has been allocated. And you will see this gradually growing over time without the process making much effort at de-allocating it.
However... If your client is a Java applet (yuck, spit, cough) then the Java applet itself is most likely not leaking memory. How can it, seeing as the Java runtime engine has a garbage collector that is responsible for deallocating memory? (but I think Sun's JavaVM has been leaking in the past, so it is not unthinkable that it will barf again at one point)
But briefly put: Java applets run at a disadvantage. They usually look like crap (certainly doesn't look or feel like other windows apps) and eat resources (CPU, memory and disk) like crazy. If you can avoid running Java applets, it will be most helpful. It will certainly help more than downgrading Vista to XP! (I do not mind people who don't like Vista, but I have yet to encounter someone who can give a sensible reason to prefer Vista -- unless a given configuration is limited by memory, this is the Win95 vs Win3.11 discussion all over again!)
BikeDude - Sunday, April 12, 2009 - link
Add the "VM Size" column, and I bet you will see which process eats your memory...!Each 32-bit process has a 4GB virtual memory space available to it, and for some reason Task Manager doesn't show how much virtual memory a process has allocated. Well, the reason is probably that most of the VM is usually backed by the paging file, so only a limited amount of physical memory is in play even though a process can allocate quite a lot of virtual memory.
But to detect a memory leak, you have to look at how much VM has been allocated. And you will see this gradually growing over time without the process making much effort at de-allocating it.
However... If your client is a Java applet (yuck, spit, cough) then the Java applet itself is most likely not leaking memory. How can it, seeing as the Java runtime engine has a garbage collector that is responsible for deallocating memory? (but I think Sun's JavaVM has been leaking in the past, so it is not unthinkable that it will barf again at one point)
But briefly put: Java applets run at a disadvantage. They usually look like crap (certainly doesn't look or feel like other windows apps) and eat resources (CPU, memory and disk) like crazy. If you can avoid running Java applets, it will be most helpful. It will certainly help more than downgrading Vista to XP! (I do not mind people who don't like Vista, but I have yet to encounter someone who can give a sensible reason to prefer Vista -- unless a given configuration is limited by memory, this is the Win95 vs Win3.11 discussion all over again!)
Zoomer - Sunday, April 12, 2009 - link
Java applets are a specialized term that indicates a java program that is embedded into a html page.See: http://java.sun.com/applets/">http://java.sun.com/applets/
With Java 5/6, lots of what you have mentioned don't really apply anymore. Ugly, not with swing + a modern look and feel. Speed and memory usage has improved markedly over the years, but they will of course be inferior to clients coded in a lower level language.
The JVM's garbage collector is quite good at what it does; I'd say Sun would be interested if you found a bug!