Should I Upgrade My Memory To 32 Gigs of Ram?
JohnDelaquiox
Posts: 1,195
I recently upgraded my main machine at work to an 8 Core Cpu with a Boards that can Take up to 32 Gigs of Memory. DDR3 Memory is incredibly cheap.
The Top Rated Stick currently Run from 160.00 to 190.00 for 32 Gigs.
Not an entirely large amount for 32 Gigs I think.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231569
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231490
I run Vue, Sculptris, Daz Studio, Lux Render, Soon I hope to get Octane.
I currently have 16gigs and my machine runs fine.
So I want to get a general opinion from my friends and other artist on here.
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Comments
The more, the better IMHO.
I have 12GB and rarely, if ever, hit the limit. Really, you should look at your Task Manger while working and see how close to the maximum you are getting - buying RAM you don't need is a waste of money and, over time, electricity. Also note that you need the Pro version of Windows to go over 16GB.
I have 24GB in my machine. Where the extra memory comes in handy is with LuxRender. At high resolutions (5kx3k), I've had Lux consuming nearly 20GB on its own. At my regular resolution of 2560x1440, it's not uncommon for Lux to consume 8GB and depending on what's in the scene, push towards 12. Having the extra memory means I can have Studio, Lux and other stuff going without running into memory pressure. I've even done stuff where a final render is baking in Lux in the background at low priority, I've got Studio up working on a new scene, and running test renders of the new one in Lux while working on tweaking the material settings.
So, given the price of memory these days, I would get as much as you can. You may not use all of it all the time, but it will afford you a lot of flexibility when you need it.
A columnist in a computer magazine once wrote: "The secret to a happy life is to spend less than you can afford on yourself, as much as you can afford on friends and family, and more than you can afford on RAM."
So yes, if your budget will stretch to it, go for it.
I recently upgraded from 8GB to 16GB and don't regret it. My machine would go deep into swap and become very slow when running certain applications. The worst case, as cwichura said, was Lux Render. Trying to render hi-res scenes in Lux would cause the machine to become unresponsive, as Lux grabbed all the physical RAM and paged deeper and deeper into VM. Since I added the extra 8GB, that doesn't happen any more.
I don't know if other DAZ applications will take advantage of the extra memory, but if you use Lux and render large scenes, do it. It may also make your machine generally a bit 'snappier' if you use memory-hungry apps like Photoshop or Lightroom.
Redacted
Luckily I already have One of the Top CPU's
AMD PHENOM FX 8 Core Running at 3.6 Gigs.
And before anyone starts on the Why Did you not get Intel. Well The Cpu Alone would have cost me more than my entire machine.
Only thing left for me to get the memory and a new Video Card.
If you are running a Daz Studio on your computer, could you please render a Fiery Genesis 2 scene
and post the rendering time, like I did in the thread:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/5620/
That's way one can compare results on different CPUs.
The bottleneck is not the amount of RAM but the speed at which it can operate. If the speed between RAM and CPU is comparable, then the more the RAM the better. Since access to RAM is a lot faster then access to Virtual memory, I have in the past disabled Virtual Memory in Windows because of how much RAM I have
That could work too.
Just read this, so I may be too late. The maximum amount of ram you can use is dependent on your operating system. Windows 7 32 bit, for instance, is 4 GB. 64 bit home basic is 8 GB. Home premium is 16 GB and Windows 7 professional is 192 GB. I run home premium and anything over 16 GB is wasted so that would be the maximum I would get, no matter what my motherboard supports. I would ensure that I got the fastest ram that my motherboard supported, although cpu speed and memory speed should complement each other. Sounds as if you have a screaming cpu so you can get pretty fast ram Good luck
I upgraded my machines to windows 7 Ultimate so it should be able to run the 32 gigs.
Thank you to every one who posted
Well, I've got 32 GB, but the only time I used up more than 30 GB was when running chkdsk on an errant harddrive.
Yeah I found that Lux Render takes what ever memory you can throw at it to render.
So 32 sounds good.
Wow, had to go research this after reading since i am also running Home premium and have 24 gigs. It's funny, I was an early adopter of 64 bit systems just for the extra memory use and in all the research I did back then never once saw a mention of different levels of your OS limiting the amount you could use, Sounds like a marketing ploy to get you to upgrade your OS LOL. Thanks for the info..
That's exactly what it is. It's all in the Serial # or CD Key (Whichever you want to call it) that determines which features get installed and activated.