Ram overkill????

[redline]

Is 8 gb of DDR2 PC2-8500 overkill for PC's or will it be make a PC faster as far as accessing programs and game and what not? I always see 4 gb here and 4 gb there but no one ever seems to fill those two empty slots with 4 more gigs. So i was just curious would that be overkill and a waste of money or would a PC benefit from 8 gigs of ram?

[RickyTick]

That's a great question, and I've been wondering myself. I have 4gb of DDR2 1000 (PC2 8000), and since ram is so cheap right now, I'm itching to buy another 4gb for $50. It can only be good, right?

[redline]

That's what i was thinking but no one i know has it or have read about it on forums... Is anyone running 8 gigs? If so share with us the benefits of having 8 gb if not im going to have to do it myself just to find out! :D

[Barrister73]

I have an E8400 with 6 gig of Ram. I notice very little difference from when I had 4 gig.

MRR

[RickyTick]

I think I'm going to do it anyway. :D

[The Wise Monkey]

Unless you have a virus scan running, are encoding a DVD, running 20 layers in Photoshop CS3, compressing 100 files in WinRar and have 30 browser tabs open, you will never be using even your 4GB of RAM, let alone having 8GB. :)

[zburns]

If your CPU has a high percent usage factor and you still have available RAM while that "high percent" usage is going on, then you do not need RAM. Vista's Task Manager and Resource Monitor lets you see the two (ram and speed) side by side so you can see when how close RAM gets to max when the CPU is in the high percent range.

I assume that when the i7s are up and running and presumably much faster, then more RAM would be required to support CPU high efficiency use; how much more, I am clueless. If Wise is right, it will take a lot of simultaneous running apps to get the newer and faster CPUs up to max efficiency where some "max amount" of RAM is required.

I am not a gamer but I have a gamer question. Assuming a high end video card not limited by the CPU, at what point does the "refresh rate" of the monitor limit a "high end" game; I guess I am referring to FPS here.

I could not discuss the answers to any of the above in detail, I just feel like these are important considerations.

[RickyTick]

Unless you have a virus scan running, are encoding a DVD, running 20 layers in Photoshop CS3, compressing 100 files in WinRar and have 30 browser tabs open, you will never be using even your 4GB of RAM, let alone having 8GB. :)

I know, I know...but size matters. :D

[The Wise Monkey]

@zburns - fps and refresh rates aren't actually related at all (unless you apply vsync). FPS is the number of frames processed and outputted by a video card per second, whereas the refresh rate is the number of times the monitor updates the view on the screen per second. So if the FPS is higher than the refresh rate, then the extra frames will just be ignored most of the time. Check out this article I found:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_7.html

[zburns]

First to Wise Monkey, let me compliment you on a "superlink" bunch of information. Everyone should pay attention to Tweakguides. Not only is the author a very bright fellow, he researched the article Wise refers to by going to eight different sources. The article is a wonderful compilation from a lot of knowledgeable people.

OK, regards my question about the relationship between monitor "refresh rate" and Video card FPS (frames per second). The article in Tweakguides points out that if FPS exceeds the refresh rate, the extra frames will not be used, discarded in effect. In the absence of using "Vsync" (which a gamer should prefer not to use because it slows things down), the discarded frames(which contain updated video info) cause the video image to exhibit "tearing" and there are pictures of "tearing" in the Tweakguides article. I am primarily using the "author's language here.

These are my comments. What I am saying is that more CPU cores mean faster CPU usage. This means faster and more powerful Video cards can be designed, even to the point that (new and faster Vcards) will only perform on the LCD monitors with the highest refresh rate. It will also be easy for the NVIDIAS of the world to build Video cards that outperform all existing monitor refresh rates, which means a new class of "supermonitors" for games would have to appear. Even if this happened, monitors would never keep up with increasing number of cores in the CPU chip.

Nor would there be any point in monitors to get "more response". Your eyes can only assimilate so much information on the screen. Up until now, 2009, faster CPU speed, more RAM, faster video cards all help the "games" work faster and view better. So the direction "games" must go in to make use of the oncoming new "speed" has to be 3D.

Wise Monkey's post, just above, about "running all the applications at the same time and never getting close to using all your 4 gig of ram" says the same thing but in a different way.

Seems to me, the current dual core and quads with 4 gig ram have "more or almost more" capability than anyone can use right now. By the way Barrister started this conversation several months ago; I said then it is a good conversation to have. Still think so!