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how much memory is a waste?

Forum Motherboards & Memory : Memory - how much memory is a waste?

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Tommunist   06-21-2003 at 01:58:13 AM

the subject speaks for itself. We'll say that it's a PC that could be used for ripping DVDs, playing the newest games, and other normal tasks. I was talking to someone the other day and they said they were going to put 2 1gig sticks of ram in their nforce2 mobo and I told them they were most likely wasting their cash and should get 512 sticks. Am I way off mark?

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Auburn9698   06-21-2003 at 02:14:46 AM
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"How much memory is a waste?"

Blasphemy!

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Tommunist   06-21-2003 at 02:18:42 AM
- 0 +

so 2 gigs of ram isn't a waste?

"Don't question it!!!" - Err

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Auburn9698   06-21-2003 at 02:33:05 AM
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Well, it could be considered a little more than necessary right now. But if they keep their machine for a couple of years, maybe not.

But hey, you're talking to someone who works with machines that can have 192GB of memory every day.

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Crashman   06-21-2003 at 07:36:02 AM
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Well, it depends on the OS. XP is so inefficient that you do notice a difference between 512MB and 1GB. But I doubt he'd notice much difference between 1GB and 2GB.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

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CompSci   06-21-2003 at 04:49:46 PM
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Perhaps the easiest and most acurate method is just start up
Windows Task manager and let it run while you do your stuff...
From the preformance tab, you get memory usage from a variety of viewpoints, Commit charge(total,limit, PEAK(good one here!), Physical Memory(AVAILABLE is good here while you have you best stuff runnin!), Kernel memory(dont be alarmed at paged cause there's really no need to have the entire kernel loaded).

Fire up task manager and let it run while ya do what ya normally need and do... Lets say perhaps anything over 25% peak while doin the most important stuff might be deamed as WASTE!
Like W2k, surfin, email and office apps usually peak doesnt go over ~240m peak.
SO do your stuff, watch your peak and availabe(while doin your most important stuff) and adjust...

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jp5   06-26-2003 at 06:56:12 AM
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512 is plenty for the average user, even if you are ripping DVDs

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Toejam31   06-26-2003 at 07:14:40 AM
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A personal example; I just used VirtualDub in WinXP to convert about 60 .MPEG files to .AVI, and 36 of those were combined into a single file that was slightly over a gigabyte in size. Combined with all the processes I already had running (17), it took about 270MB of RAM. Since I have a gigabyte of system memory, you can see that I had plenty left over, and didn't even come close to using what was available.

2GB of RAM might not be a complete waste in WinXP, but for a desktop system, it <i>could</i> be considered approaching overkill.

Toey

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marneus   06-26-2003 at 02:27:22 PM
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want a laugh, try getting a W9x machine to run properly with 1gig of memory, thats not even inefficient...

Trust me I know what I'm doing... ooops, grab the cat...

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addiarmadar   06-26-2003 at 08:04:20 PM
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On 32bit platforms anything more than 1 gig is a bit of a waste but on 64bit platforms and higher that is another story.

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Balderdash   06-26-2003 at 09:01:52 PM
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So, if 1 gig is enough, what if you have dualchannel support? Then it should be 2gigs right? : ) lol

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Tommunist   06-26-2003 at 09:02:47 PM
- 0 +

rrriiight.

"Don't question it!!!" - Err

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Crashman   06-26-2003 at 09:38:39 PM
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Windows 98SE uses a lot les RAM than XP, so the need for huge amounts of RAM doesn't exist. 512MB under 98SE is not just the limit of what you can run without tweaks, it's the limit of what you'll probably ever need anyway.

98SE runs fine on less than half the memory of XP.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

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