How important is memory?

[wolverinero79]

So i was bored a couple nights ago, so i decided to try to open as many applications on my computer as i could before it died. I got EVERYTHING open with 20% resources left (i mean everything, paintshop, photoshop, warcraft 3, quake 3, UT, every office application, half-life, ie, netscape, media player, realone, winamp, Medal of Honor, heroes 4, etc.). Next i did a couple tests. I switched back and forth through apps and my system was fine (just like if the 2 apps i switched b/w were the only things running). I even played a little dm match on q3 with everything in the background and tested my framerate - same as always. And in photoshop, i had 3 50 mb files open and i filled them all with gradiant, textured backgrounds in about a second each (no joke). So how important IS memory? I can't see a bottleneck on any of my applications. Obviously i feel confused and want to know what's going on. He he, btw, after i closed everything down, i had 15% less resources than when i started (way to go crappy memory management).

Specs:
1.7 (400) P4
Soyo P4 Ultra Dragon MB with SiS 645 chipset
Geforce 256 Plus 64 MB (Dell hybrid garbage - getting a Geforce 4 4400 soon)
512 MB 2700 Corsair DDR (in one DIMM, running on 2.5V)
7200 40 GB Maxtor drive
Win 98SE

Any thoughts?

Athlons and Pentiums are just melted rock. Who’s rock is better? Who cares, let’s play some games

 

[pcilliterate]

Try burning a cd on the fly, have Sisoft sandra doing a bench test, have HD-tach going as well, do a CPU intensive application like toast-UD-or seti, play a movie and do a download at the same time as printing a photo image in high resolution. Meantime you could be doing disk2disk data tranfers and play a major game! . Now if that dont shut ya down I wanna know everything about your build.

 

[Jake75]

Talk about massive punishment, lol!

<font color=red>Dopplereffekt</font color=red>

 

[bum_jcrules]

"He he, btw, after i closed everything down, i had 15% less resources than when i started (way to go crappy memory management)."


All of the DLLs were still loaded onto your memory even though the program is shut down. Windows will automatically unload DLLs when the usage count is zero. However this is only after they have not been used for some arbitrary, normally very long, period of time.



BTW: how nuts was your HDD going? You were probably swap-filing. Also, your system is probably fast in swap-filing because you have the SIS all-in-one chipset. Less distance to from one end of the PCI and AGP bus to the memory and the HDD. This observation is just speculation.)

<b>"If I melt dry ice in a bathtub, can I take a bath without getting wet?" - Steven Wright</b>

 

[wolverinero79]

See that was the thing. My hard drive was chilling (it was barely accessing). That's the thing that's really confusing me. Because everything couldn't possibly have been in the RAM, could it? Maybe it was hiding somewhere else on the mobo, lol. Even the jumpers have storage capacity now, lol (not quite, but it would be funny)

Athlons and Pentiums are just melted rock. Who’s rock is better? Who cares, let’s play some games

 

[Oracle]

Have you checked under your pilow?
;-)


<font color=red>A platform is not an oil rig.</font color=red>

 

[wolverinero79]

Oh, so that's where my p2 450 went....i was looking for that forever...thanks.

Athlons and Pentiums are just melted rock. Who’s rock is better? Who cares, let’s play some games

 

[bum_jcrules]

Send me that P2450. I'll upgrade my Celeron 333. hehe.

Sad thing is that I am not joking. I have a system with a C2 333 in it. It also has a Voodoo 2. Severly optimized. It shuts down in a little less than 3 seconds. I love that machine. I have gotten a lot of mileage out of it.

<b>"If I melt dry ice in a bathtub, can I take a bath without getting wet?" - Steven Wright</b>

 

[tbirdXPplus]

yeah i know that fealing, using a outdated system very efficiently.

my last was a p2-450, but by making a huge mistake in the beginning(i used a VIA 691 mobo), it was way to unstable, not to mention that it didn`t work with winXP. the reason i upgraded was that i wanted to use a NT based OS(just for stability)

i`m planning to use this t-bird1.4 for..i`d say, at least 4 yrs. not possible? we`ll see

Be nice.