PC3200 worth it?

[meerkat]

Whether RAM size is more important or RAM speed has no correct unique answer, as it depends on how you use your computer most of the time. Plus, given a specific user habit (for example for RAM speed centric user), RAM size becomes more important when less than 512M. And vice versa.

I believe for many the user, a ram of 512-1G RAM, neither speed or bigger size is important – for quite some users.

But from pragmatic point of view, typically ram size has more important for me than speed.

· Faster ram will affect me only when speed is bottleneck, which seldom is the case. Not for word processing, for compiling therotically yes, practically no (hard drive speed and fragmentation status places WAY bigger factor than ram speed, but a migger RAM size will reduce tmp file swapping). For gaming, ram speed is a plus. For multimedia, surprisingly no, see later.

· Nowadays, no OS is running a single application, they co share the memory, so even an application does not take that much RAM does not means the system does not need that many.

· You think an application does not use 100% ram means it does not need so much? Not necessarily true. For quite some decent applications, they only reserve portion of physical RAM for their own data use, and left the rest for system or other application use. For example, photoshop CS2 by default use only 55% of physical RAM (and hope it is continguous, which smaller RAM seldom garantee this), if not enough, it use scratch disk (use our OS terminology, it is swapping). So you already get the performance penalty even though you see the RAM still has lots of free blocks. Plus more RAM means more than you may think, see here.
· For video editing, encoding is with slower RAM is actually not a hassle for me typically, but size is. The reason being, encoding is pretty much CPU intensive and lengthy process, so I seldom wait there or I do not mind waiting 5 more sends for a 20 minutes (typically longer) encoding. But I do mind the slowness when I do the video editing (before the final encoding). Typically, when I do a transition or effects, I need to see in real time if it is really what I want, so I need a realtime rendering. Many application, premiere, vegas, or after effects render the effects to RAM, which is a big memory hog, plus remember, they all only use the portion of physical RAM they reserved before they have to use a much slower disk.

As I said, there is no right answer, but I found more people in various occasions, RAM size is more matter.

Just my 2 cent.

[fill2k]

I agree with Meerkat.

In my case I use my system with Lotus Notes(with it's companion applications). Company where I work for has a Notes based application which easily has 30 Notes databases.

Notes is not a CPU intensive application(except for occasional background process), but Notes with the database views. view indeces, etc, is a memory hog. Aside from Lotus Notes, I have several Sysadmin apps loaded at the same time.

I don't game, nor do video editing with my laptop, I have my A64 Desktop with Dual Channel for that purpose. So in my case, memory size is important.

Like I said in the past, I really think it depends on your budget. Prices are so close between the DDR333 & DDR400, it almost doesn't matter anymore... if your system supports DDR400, and you can afford the "little" price premium, get DDR400.

[chinna_n]

Meerkat,

One thing I agree is, size does matter when your RAM is less than 1GB(not for all app though). That is what I explained. I use Pinnacle studio, Ulead Video Studio and Paintship pro along with Servers apps I use. None of those benifitted with RAM more than 1GB. Infact I removed 512MB from desktop to make it 1GB, so that latencies are little better and I saw some improvement in encoding.

As I stated before, Check the Tomshardware article, they have tested almost all kind of applications (Including photoshop I remember), gaming etc.It clearly shows, there is no improvement after 1GB of RAM for 95% applications( that includes Pinnacle).

When I check how much memory my applications are using, I also check to see if my swap memory has been increased, but that hasn't been the case.

Yes, in word editing you may not see any difference, but you see difference in gaming, video encoding and quite few applications benifit from DDR400 RAM, ofcourse is it worth $100 more? no, I do not think so, but is it worth $25 more, yes. Actually price is almost same for DDR400 and DDR333 for all major manufacturers.

[Fosters]

I think there is some confusion here.

Let me try to clarify things somewhat.

1. Every application is benifited by running RAM DDR400 speed

2. Having more DDR333 RAM only helps when application really needs that much memory. I see many people claiming 1.25GB DDR333 faster than 1GB DDR400. How many applications use more than 1GB in Win XP, to be frank hardly any. If you see recent Tomshardware testing about how much RAM you needs, 1GB is saturation point for all current applications. There is no advantage after that(Unless you have some specific memory hog applications).

Having 1GB of DDR400 helps accross spectrum from Video games to Video encoding to even code compiling, ofcourse only 15%, but having 1.25GB of DDR400 RAM does not help at all, that 0% for 95% applications.

i have 2gb of ram in my desktop, and i'm tempted to upgrade to 4gb. I tend to work and play at the same time, running world of warcraft and query analyzer at the same time. since the laptop runs wow just fine, that's already 800-900 megs of ram used right there. query analyzer, depending on what kind of recordsets i'm returning, can go anywhere from 100 megs used to 3gb... (not pretty)

my view on it, if you're gonna upgrade the ram, esp going with 1gb sticks, get the 400mhz ones. if you have the stock 333 mhz 256 modules, and wondering if it's worth keeping one, unless you're on the very verge of 1gb not being enough, then junk it and run the thing at 400 mhz, as 256 isn't gonna make a diff. 1gb at 400mhz vs 1.5gb at 333mhz is a more serious comparisson though (to answer another poster's question) and really depends on what you're running. if it's just regular web browsing, email and whatnot, 1gb at 400mhz is sufficient. if you're running memory intensive stuff, you should be better off with the 1.5gb.

faster memory makes a huge impact, but when you run out of it, the hard drive is a heck of a lot slower than even slow memory.

[meerkat]

When I check how much memory my applications are using, I also check to see if my swap memory has been increased, but that hasn't been the case.

I do not understand how this proves you have enough memory.

1. When swapping happens, swap size reserved by the system does not increase. A stable sized swap region may means none or frequent swapping. swap sizes increases only when the reserved swap region is no longer big enough too, meaning, the memory is not just short, but badly short.

2. High performace applications (written by a startup company that rush to the market for 1.x release is an exception) do their own memory management. On start up, they allocate one or few chunk of region (memory partition) from system pool. Such chunk size is in portion to the size of physical RAM. Application then do it's own memory management inside the the chunk of region. When in shortage, these applications do their own smarter swapping. These activities are transparent to the OS, so the OS never understand or report such thing as swapping.

Using system swap activities as reference never tell you the whole story behind the scence. Many many multimedia applications, database etc fall to such scenario. If you never feel any slow down in such case, you won't feel the slow memory speed I bet.

So,

when you run out of it, the hard drive is a heck of a lot slower than even slow memory

may happens even when the system still has free RAM.

3. Tom hardware report has to be tested in a isolated environment (otherwise, it is hard to make any judgement due to too many factors weighing in).

I believe the claim that photoshop does not need big memory is either a false memory or a Tom's joke. (Unless the tester only use PS to edit icon or simply open then close image).

Even when you edit a single image in PS, every action that modifies pixels results in a image snapshot (so that you can undo -- roll back upto 99 steps). Such thing are memory hungry when retouch a image. (unlike text based word, that only need to record the delta part of change).

Also, layer is heart and soul for PS, if Tom tester ever touch this ball and play with it, he knows what it means to the memory, the mem size is displayed on the left bottom status bar.

[re-edited]
I have to be fair to PS's need on memory. Yes, it needs a lot of memory, on the other hand, when shortage results in disk swapping, it is not as bad as some other application. It is people who interactive with computer. People's slowness plus operation on a still image is nottoo big deal on non-real-time response. Living with small RAM may bearable.

[Fosters]

I do not understand how this proves you have enough memory.

True, that only means the swap file is big enough

simple memory test for me, do a select * from [tablename] (nolock); brings back all the records from a specific table, at full sql server/network speed... do that in query analyzer with text output (which for some stupid reason takes more memory than grid output, good job MS) on a table with 50+ mil records, and you'll see just about when you run out of ram. stop it, see how many records it's gotten from the server, and figure out if i can work with that (my desktop can get about 20 mil rows before it runs out of ram and starts swapping for example) I can work with that, i wont ever need that much purely for sql, but it's good to have a safety net. my laptop, in it's current state, 512 mb ram and 128 taken by the vid card, is in a much worse scenario. I havent ran the "test" yet because i can't add the laptop to the domain (just found out that's one feature they took out in xp home...), but as soon as i do, i'll figure out how it compares to the desktop/how much more ram do i really need.

Another memory hog program that i love playing with is VMware. run up two instances of windows 2000 server and you're bound to need more than 1gb ram. awesome tool when you need a quick webserver and sql server for a quick app.

[Mr. Hollywood]

Well I ordered 2 sticks of OCZ 512MB PC 3200. 1GB should be fine for my uses and itll be a little bit quicker.

[Soul814]

thats cool =) i didnt have money so i ordered 1gb pc3200 sodimm 200pin ocz =D lol n im going to use 512mb hp stock ram, which means my speeds going down =( but its okay I guess till I have more money