"...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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erple2 - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
Does the computer run out of memory and throw errors, or are you just looking at something like the task manager for RAM usage? If it's not throwing errors, I wouldn't worry about it.Postoasted - Saturday, April 11, 2009 - link
Never did show any errors. The PC would just go sluggish.armandbr - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
> When I'm downloading something using BT and the download rate is at my MAX (1.5mb/s)RAM usage goes way up.What BT software are you using ? Have you tried micro torrent ?
I used to use Azureus, thinking the amount of options were giving any advantage.
I tried microtorrent, and it turns out it doesn't.
Postoasted - Saturday, April 11, 2009 - link
Using the blue frog 2.5.0.4 with the latest Java. Tried Utorrent 1.8 and liked it a lot except for some reason some torrents would stop altogether without any reason that I could find. I tried a bunch of other BT clients as well but I always came back to Azureus for its flexibility. It's weird, sometimes it's rock solid and doesn't eat up ram and then other times you can see it draining the ram away. With 6 gigs of ram I can download at full speed for about an hour before I need to reboot. I can live with it, but I'll take your suggestion and give Micro Torrent a look.Zoomer - Sunday, April 12, 2009 - link
You probably need to upgrade your jvm? Something is wrong there.I had to switch from Azureus to uTorrent and didn't really like it. Sure, it uses less ram, but many features in Azureus aren't in. For example, filter by keyword, more involved rules, no moving of files to another directory after removal, etc.
Spoelie - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
That's down to vista and the programs/drivers on ur rig. Bad programming.Do the same thing on xp and I doubt you would be even pushing the 1GB barrier.
Yes it's THAT bad.
Not hearsay btw, my gf bought a dell laptop with 4GB ram and vista on it, and gets the 'out of memory dialog' all the time, even when not running much of anything. Obviously the fault of some rogue driver/program, but same programs running on xp everything silky smooth.
Goty - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
WOW that was a bad post.Take a look at the OP's post again... go ahead, I'll wait.
That's right, he's running XP-64, not Vista.
VTOLfreak - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
Owned...Ive run XP64 and Vista64 and with the same hardware Vista64 is actually faster. Thats because Vista uses all the free memory for caching unlike XP where I have +10GB memory poking its nose.
To be fair: The XP64 install did boot up faster. Mostly caused by the smaller footprint of XP.
san1s - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
i currently have 2 gb of ddr2, I don't really need more as of now, I don't multitask that much as I can only concentrate on one thing at a time anywayjordanclock - Friday, April 10, 2009 - link
I just put another 2x1GBs of RAM in the other day. I went with another pair of G.Skill DDR2-800 since I had no problems with the first pair and the price is very reasonable.I think RAM is one aspect that people tend to overbuy. Extremely high clock speeds or low latency rarely seems to translate into real world performance, yet we still see people buying high end RAM kits for very small gains. I'm not going to tell people how to spend their money, but I really don't see the benefit of a $100+ memory kit over a ~$50 kit most of the time.