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12GB Ram and 24GB Ram

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Gangifilms

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Hey Guys,

This thread is more on the discussion of RAM in general.

I have 6 Dimms of 2 GB loaded up in my mobo for a total of 12GB of RAM clocked at 1800mhz with some pretty tight timings.

My questions is, will this be enough for now? And when will I start running into some problems in the future that I might need more ram?
 
Depends on the app. Are you CORE SHARING in compressor? etc. Processing is processing... the task determines the memory required/desired. Most software gives minimums, always best to double it.
 
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Well I assume it's always safe to double what you got. However I believe if people are shooting on RED then they have enough money to get a solid workstation PC with 40GB+ of RAM.
 
If you render out BIG stuff then having lots of RAM is vital. RAM has a nice little tendency to get corrupted every now and then when it has to, ah, put in those extra work hours. And at those times you really don't want the computer finding out that it has nowhere to put it's stuff - that always results in nasty stuff (crashes most prominent among them, and trust me - you do not want to know how it feels having a 40h+ render crashing on you...and with longer render times, that frustration could become substantial).
But for anything short of handling really large files in active memory you don't really need anything beyond 12-24GB.
 
Erik Franzén said:
If you render out BIG stuff then having lots of RAM is vital. RAM has a nice little tendency to get corrupted every now and then when it has to, ah, put in those extra work hours. And at those times you really don't want the computer finding out that it has nowhere to put it's stuff - that always results in nasty stuff (crashes most prominent among them, and trust me - you do not want to know how it feels having a 40h+ render crashing on you...and with longer render times, that frustration could become substantial).
But for anything short of handling really large files in active memory you don't really need anything beyond 12-24GB.
Click to expand...

Erik, just to clear this up in my own mind, RAM is as important, if not more so, in rendering?... independent of any GPU-added rendering, of course.
 
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Max out the RAM, you can have enough RAM. 32gig is the minimal one should have, 64gig is ideal. Ram is 100,000x faster than a hard drive and it is the most underutilized aspect of modern computing. Get as much as that will possibly fit in your computer.
 
More RAM is often better, but we should ask what his system specs are... How many CPUs/Cores? What chipset / memory host and memory bus configuration? Most i5 and i7 PC motherboards perform optimally with multiples of 3GB or 6GB RAM as they are a triple-channel memory architecture with 2 slots per channel. You get the best performance with all slots populated with identical spec modules.

However, most of these systems can only operate certain capacities at certain speeds. Doubling RAM capacity to 24GB may reduce the maximum speed to the memory bus. At this time, the 4GB modules on the market also have slower timings than the 1GB and 2GB modules. Faster clocked modules tend to have higher latency and init/reset timings.

Most applications are still bound to 32bit memory space and even 32bit memory management models. This applies to a lot of apps that have recently moved to 64bit as well.

If this is a quad-core system, 12GB is probably just fine unless you want to load up several apps at once. With 64bit software a good rule to follow is to have 4GB per core if you do any heavy rendering or multi-core processing. If your software is primarily 32bit, then work off a 2GB per core principle... But I think 8GB is pretty much a minimum for any pro system these days. 12GB to 16GB is optimal for any pro quad-core system, depending on application load more can be better.

Going back to what I said above about clock speeds and timings, you have to know your hardware before you upgrade. You may find that your system can run 24GB RAM, but may drop the maximum memory clock to 1600MHz and also the larger 4GB modules will most likely have slower timings, unless you have slow 2GB modules to begin with. Based on clock speed alone, you could be taking a 12% (or more) memory performance hit by doubling your capacity.

The numbers are hypothetical, but do check your hardware specs before upgrading.
 
I've never seen an i5 or i7 (LGA 1156) with tripple channel memory or upgradability to 24GBytes of memory.. only LGA 1366 that has these features.. its all CPU related as the memory controller is inside the CPU chip.. i5/i7 running on LGA 1156 will have only maximum of 16 GB of ram on dual channel memory configuration..

as clock speed is important, the larger amount of RAM you have will save you a huge bottleneck going from RAM to Disk and vice versa.. when I run CS5 PPro and AE together on small projects I get 11+ GB of my 12 filled.. imagine running photoshop beside them which eats 3.5GB of RAM without any images opened.. that would decrease the performance much more than the 12% you loose on clock speed..
I have 12GB of 1333MHz RAM and I don't face a lot of bottlenecks, but I face some.. some times the apps crashes coz the memory is full, rarely but it happens..

just try to test someone else's systems which have 24GBytes and see the difference..
 
Well I understand, It just depends how large of a multitasker you are and how many windows you want to leave open. Since I already bought my system I will just have to be more conservative with my usage, probably leave page filing still on.
 
Mohammed El Sharqawy said:
I've never seen an i5 or i7 (LGA 1156) with tripple channel memory or upgradability to 24GBytes of memory..
Click to expand...

Brain fart, not sure why I was saying triple channel... As of right now, most current boards will accept 4GB DIMMs, which would give 24GB on most i5/i7 boards with 6 DIMM sockets. But the memory controller has to make performance compromises with larger capacities, and often so does the motherboard to an even greater extent.

I think he's best off with the 12GB he's already bought. 24GB would require him to drop to 1600MHz memory clock. This would not necessarily be a bad thing as 1600MHz DIMMs have slightly faster timings in some cases. However, by going to 4GB DIMMs to get 24GB total, he would be increasing his latency and cycle timings along with the slower memory clock. Not sure it would be worth it unless he is running lots of really RAM-hungry stuff all the time.

And Gangifilms -- real name... Get it fixed, stop by the Real Names thread in Recon.
 
Ahh ok, I was wondering why it's not user name since that is what I was using. I'll get it fixed. Thanks for the replies everyone.
 
Elsie N said:
Erik, just to clear this up in my own mind, RAM is as important, if not more so, in rendering?... independent of any GPU-added rendering, of course.
Click to expand...
Elsie,
I would say yes. Often it has less to do with making things go faster and more of making things go at all. I don't know how much you know about computers, but RAM is basically a big pool of memory (just like a HDD) that is freed up and allocated as various applications request it.
Now, where does having loads of RAM come in? Well, it's two-fold. First off, the application wants to be able to allocate however much RAM (within reason...) that it can. Second, you always want to (if possible) to have some in reserve in case some of it gets corrupted and/or another program/process starts requesting more memory (RAM).

RAM gets corrupted just like HDD:s do (bad blocks). The difference is that often RAM can get corrupted during a computer session or rendering session, often temporarily due to an overheat or some piece of mischievous allocated memory. Anyhow, that causes a problem if there is no memory left since the program spews out for memory, the computer will say: "Out of stock..." and the program will then, obediently, inform you that the program cannot continue working (or worse, just crashes with an "out of memory" or "access violation << memory adress >>".

Don't go overkill thou! There is no reason to stock up ridicolous amounts of RAM on anything that is not mission critical. Somewhere up from 6-12 GB RAM is good for a working rig, 24GB is great. If there is a lot of important rendering or other applications that may take up a lot of memory (sound mixing, 3d rendering, 2d rendering, etc etc.) then it is wise to err on the safe side.

Ah, hope that answers your question:cornut:
 
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