Well, I screwed up

BenF · Apr 20, 2009

Last night I bought some ram for my computer. I ment to get 2x2gb ddr2 1066 (5-5-5-15), but for one reason or another my order on newegg went through twice. Unfortunately I didn't catch this soon enough and my oder already shipped out. Now I have the choice of keeping both sets, or rmaing one (no rma or restocking fee). I'm using vista ultimate 64 bit with the system in my sig. I main game, watch movies, and listen to music. Will there be any benefit to having 8gb vs. 4gb? If so will it be noticable for me to justify the extra cost?

chuck4456 · Apr 21, 2009

BenF said:
Last night I bought some ram for my computer. I ment to get 2x2gb ddr2 1066 (5-5-5-15), but for one reason or another my order on newegg went through twice. Unfortunately I didn't catch this soon enough and my oder already shipped out. Now I have the choice of keeping both sets, or rmaing one (no rma or restocking fee). I'm using vista ultimate 64 bit with the system in my sig. I main game, watch movies, and listen to music. Will there be any benefit to having 8gb vs. 4gb? If so will it be noticable for me to justify the extra cost?

You never know.
Try it and see.

kkpudge7 · Apr 21, 2009

How much did you pay for them? If you didn't break your bank too much just keep them

BenF · Apr 21, 2009

They were about 50 each. Its not whether the price is too much or not. Its about whether or not there will be any benefit. I don't want to open both and try them as I can't get my advanced rma refund and I have to pay restocking fees. I really just want to know if there is any benefit to having 8gb over 4gb.

x30Jx · Apr 21, 2009

yeah, keep them
Worst comes to worst, you can recycle them into another PC, or just use all 8.
As long as you run x64 MOST of the time, then you are gold.

BenF · Apr 21, 2009

Thanks x30jx, I also read somewhere about people turning off the pagefile with 8gb of ram and having performance increases. I do not see myself filling 8gb with just programs (I can see filling 4gb though) and I'm considering this. What have your experiences been? Is there a benchmark that will look at this? Or is it something you just notice (windows being a bit faster)?

PsycoPhreak · Apr 21, 2009

You can turn off the page-file even with 4gb, I've never ran into a problem, but the "gain" will be minimal at best on a machine that is fast to begin with. I keep one going on a separate drive in all my rigs, and I set it to half the installed memory amount... again, never a problem.

As for 8gb being a noticeable difference over 4gb? Not really, at least not at the present time, unless you happen to be using a memory hungry app/program. Upside to more memory is the availability of faster ram vs. pagefile... larger programs and files load faster because they have more space to use, Games can benefit from it as well, load times for different levels can decrease as "pre-caching" will have more to use... and so on...

The biggest downside to using 4 sticks is you are maxing out the ram slots, which in most cases, puts more stress on the NB. This can result in the inability to OC to the same level you could with only 2 sticks, or even system stability issues at stock settings if the NB is weak... Sometimes you have to give the NB voltage a little bump just to keep things running as they were...

Only way to really know how more ram will work out in your particular setup is to try it out, unfortunately, as results will differ from one setup to another...

Hey Mr. Gates... what ever happened to "Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" huh? LOL :beer:

cyberfish · Apr 21, 2009

You won't feel any difference.

Page file won't be used anyways if you have free RAM, and 4GB is more than enough. Keeping the page file just means waste a few hundred MBs of your HD.

BenF · Apr 21, 2009

PsycoPhreak said:
You can turn off the page-file even with 4gb, I've never ran into a problem, but the "gain" will be minimal at best on a machine that is fast to begin with. I keep one going on a separate drive in all my rigs, and I set it to half the installed memory amount... again, never a problem.

As for 8gb being a noticeable difference over 4gb? Not really, at least not at the present time, unless you happen to be using a memory hungry app/program. Upside to more memory is the availability of faster ram vs. pagefile... larger programs and files load faster because they have more space to use, Games can benefit from it as well, load times for different levels can decrease as "pre-caching" will have more to use... and so on...

The biggest downside to using 4 sticks is you are maxing out the ram slots, which in most cases, puts more stress on the NB. This can result in the inability to OC to the same level you could with only 2 sticks, or even system stability issues at stock settings if the NB is weak... Sometimes you have to give the NB voltage a little bump just to keep things running as they were...

Only way to really know how more ram will work out in your particular setup is to try it out, unfortunately, as results will differ from one setup to another...

Hey Mr. Gates... what ever happened to "Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" huh? LOL

I'm using a PII 720be so my oc is done with just the cpu multiplyer and vcore increases. Everything else is stock, would 4 sticks still hurt that? I was under the impression that it would not.

MARCI · Apr 22, 2009

BenF, whatever memory you have vista will use, either for applications and operations, or for superfetch (loading into unused memory whatever it thinks you're gonna ask for next) keep the 8

PsycoPhreak · Apr 22, 2009

BenF said:
I'm using a PII 720be so my oc is done with just the cpu multiplyer and vcore increases. Everything else is stock, would 4 sticks still hurt that? I was under the impression that it would not.

I never thought to look at your sig to see what you're running... ignore the NB issues I mentioned as it doesn't apply to your hardware...

Since I run only Intel, maybe someone with more AMD hands on experience can give you an idea of what to expect as far as any issues populating all the ram slots on your setup. I don't believe you'll have any problems though...

BenF · Apr 22, 2009

I think I'm going to keep 8. Thanks for the help guys. I've gotta look into superfetch. Rightnow my hdd is my biggest bottleneck so having to access it less will be great! I need to look into superfetch. Also, can I have a whole program assigned to be prefetched automatically? I'd love to do that for call of duty 5 and company of heroes.

For a little while people thought 2gb would be more than enough and rapidly that changed to 4gb. So why not partisipate in the new one (6-12) when its getting started

btw, I've had no problems detecting the ram slots. All work perfectly.

IAmMoen · Apr 22, 2009

ok so I have 8 gigs of ram but my pagefile is 1.75 gigs still. Ram usage is at 18% (1.8 gigs). When I look around at all the places talking about a pagefile they say that the more ram you have the less of a pagefile you will have and more ram usage. I think I am just going to get rid of the pagefile. 8gig should be able to handle it all nicely.

MARCI · Apr 22, 2009

Leave the pagefile alone.. that's where vista will store things it MIGHT need, so wants to have ready, but doesn't think it will need as quickly as superfetch.. basicly that cuts down on seek time on your harddrive.

Ram= what it's using right now
superfect= what it thinks it might need next
paged area = info it might need soon, and wants to have ready, but doesn't think it needs soon enough to use superfetch space for

everything else=if you need it, it will have to search the hard drive for it, then load it.

Aynjell · Apr 22, 2009

If it's not too expensive and you're not tight with money at the moment, I say keep it. my opinion changes however, if you have a quad core on a 780i. that's the quickest way to kill a motherboard (oc'd quad with 4 sticks).

but it looks like you have an AMD setup. Is it AM2+? Or AM3? AM2+ I don't even think you can use 4 sticks past a certain clock speed. Supposedly it's limited but you might be able to oc it to the settings it's supposed to run at. If it's AM3 and DDR3, then it's your call.

MongGrel · Apr 22, 2009

Yeah, I've been using 8 awhile now and have turned the pagefile off now and again experimenting, didn't seem to make a big difference here. I think your bettor off leaving on one myself, I stick the page file on my storage array and seems to work fine.

Personally, I think I did have to crank up my NB a bit more to get everything stable, my cooling is pretty good there though. But I had 8 on my old board to begin with and never ran with 4 on this one, so a bit hard to give a definitive answer here I guess. Maybe it didn't matter much.

Well, I screwed up

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