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Upgrading RAM amount; please help me choose.
superboyac:
Well, the recommended upgrade according to the Memory Adviser Tool is:
JavaJones:
The memory adviser on Crucial.com consistently provides good recommendations and is generally the 1st place I tell people to go. Once you have the memory specs you can shop around for better pricing, but their prices are not bad either and Crucial is good memory.
About the only real (normal person) 'workstation' intensive process I can think of is CGI rendering. And if you're doing a lot of that, having more CPUs (as in a small cheap render farm) is far more efficient than having a single beefed-up workstation. And that includes those that support dual chips.
-40hz (January 03, 2012, 09:30 AM)
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As someone who does us rendering software (mostly Terragen) I can say in fact that a single system is *more* efficient, if you're talking about power use and quick turnaround time. For absolute rendering power yes getting a bunch of cheaper machines focused on CPU and RAM to make a mini render farm will crank out renders the fastest, but it will take up a lot of room, generate a lot of heat, and cost a lot in electricity. My overclocked i7 2600k at 4.6Ghz is twice as fast as my old i7 920 (no slouch itself), and doesn't really use much more power (same TDP for the CPU and I don't think it's been overvolted for the OC).
* Note: I seem to recall a few DCers (Carol or f0dder maybe?) were running with 16Gb. Maybe they and some of 'those that have' could weigh-in on this? I'm curious too since I'll need to seriously start thinking about a new build sometime this year.
-40hz (January 03, 2012, 09:30 AM)
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I'm one of those people. ;D I have 16GB of RAM in new primary workstation, 15GB in my secondary workstation/render box, and 10GB in my laptop. And while I did say I do rendering and that's certainly one of the things that uses a good deal of RAM, I actually find image editing to be at least as demanding. The combination of Photoshop and Lightroom, or a panorama stitcher like Kolor Autopano working on full resolution RAW source images, or an HDR app doing image stacking like Photomatix. Now run any one of those simultaneously (which is often advantageous), along with a web browser or two (I usually have Firefox and Chrome open at the same time), and RAM quickly gets eaten up. I am indeed a power user but then so are most people here.
- Oshyan
40hz:
@SB - ok, looks like I'm outvoted on the 8Gb vs 16Gb argument by DC folk who are currently using 16, so please disregard my earlier questioning of how advantageous it would be. :)
superboyac:
@SB - ok, looks like I'm outvoted on the 8Gb vs 16Gb argument by DC folk who are currently using 16, so please disregard my earlier questioning of how advantageous it would be. :)
-40hz (January 03, 2012, 05:49 PM)
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Not a problem. Knowing myself, I tend to go overboard initially anyway, so in the end, the advice was good.
superboyac:
I have more serious issues to deal with...BSOD all over the place. I have some kind of weird memory, hardware, or something problem. This all happened lately when I started experimenting around with live streaming a radio station that I want to do. Something has gone wrong. But hell if I know what it is. I've installed and uninstalled dozens of programs, I've changed some hardware settings. I have no idea. It's always a big BSOD with a couple of seconds of dumping memory off, which I've never seen before. Usually, a BSOD is static. I've never had this one where it shows a couple of seconds of memory percentage dumping. I hope it's not hardware.
I also just noticed that when I rebooted and the part which shows all the hard drives coming up...that is usually very quick, this time it had to wait several seconds to detect the each drive. Made me think I have a motherboard problem.
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