a ram upgrade should be simple, right?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
T

thewiley1

Distinguished
Feb 22, 2012
20
2
18,515
...except that I have devised ways to overthink it...

I have a Dell XPS 8700 with an i7 and 4 DRAM slots. When I took it in trade, it had 12 GB (2x4G + 2x2G) of RAM. I bought a 16 GB upgrade kit of the fastest ram it can take (matched set 2x8G) on Amazon for $129. Now I have to decide whether to leave any of the slow modules in place.

Before I go on, I would like to curse Dell for putting inferior memory in this box when they built it..

I used Passmark 9.0 to measure benchmarks. I am not a gamer, so I don't care much about 3D graphics. Here are my numbers for CPU / Memory / and Overall:

12 GB : ..9313 / 2404 / 3147 = 89 / 92 / 93%
16 GB : 10426 / 2810 / 3367 = baseline
20 GB : ..9703 / 2615 / 3249 = 93 / 93 / 96%
24 GB : ..9581 / 2485 / 3278 = 92 / 88 / 97%

So, we've confirmed that adding slow RAM to a fast system drags everything down. Based on these numbers, the 20GB configuration looks like a poor choice. So it comes down to either 16 GB or 24 GB.

I spend my days with 12 to 20 windows open on four 28" screens. There are 15 icons in the tray including VPN, proxy, and remote hosts. There is usually music or video streaming on one of the screens.

Should I be willing to give up approx 3 to 12% of my computing power to get 50% more RAM for running apps?



 
Solution
InvalidError
You can have performance degradation long before hitting 100% memory utilization: once you no longer have enough spare memory to keep frequently used files in the OS' file system cache, you lose performance to the OS having to reload files from storage instead of cache. Also, the less spare RAM you have, the more pre-emptive swapping the OS will do to free up physical memory.

What you should be looking at is disk activity, especially at times where you aren't expecting it.
Sort by date Sort by votes
InvalidError

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
May 18, 2007
23,815
5,265
108,890
If you have enough stuff loaded to use most of that 16GB and start heavily hitting the swapfile or frequently have to reload data from the HDD, then you are going to lose 80-99% of your performance while the CPU is waiting for storage and the 3-12% loss in memory benchmarks becomes insignificant.

Nothing ruins performance like not having enough RAM to comfortably accommodate your typical workload. I'd take having plenty of slower RAM to spare over the performance hit from having to rely on the swapfile any day.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
T

thewiley1

Distinguished
Feb 22, 2012
20
2
18,515
Yes, I agree. So, then the question becomes whether all my open windows are triggering swap file usage. I'm running a performance monitor from IOBit that displays RAM, CPU, Disk, and Network usage in real time. How will I know when the swap file is being used? Just watch to see when RAM approaches 16 GB? I've never seen that happen. Is there a better tool out there that I can try?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
InvalidError

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
May 18, 2007
23,815
5,265
108,890
You can have performance degradation long before hitting 100% memory utilization: once you no longer have enough spare memory to keep frequently used files in the OS' file system cache, you lose performance to the OS having to reload files from storage instead of cache. Also, the less spare RAM you have, the more pre-emptive swapping the OS will do to free up physical memory.

What you should be looking at is disk activity, especially at times where you aren't expecting it.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom