PC Forum

" @Kblt said:

" @Branthog said:

" @Kblt said:

8Gbs of DDR2? Woah, I've never put into any systems I've built more than 6GBs of RAM. "

RAM is so cheap these days, you almost can't afford the hassle of not having enough when it comes down to it. My T5140 has 32GB of RAM (it'll hold up to 128gb) and my mac pro has 16gb (it'll hold up to 32gb). If you were stuck using windows, I couldn't imagine running it (along with a full system of applications and games and everything else) on less than 6gb or preferably 8gb.  Of course, that's nothing compared to my first computer -- the VIC-20 which would hold (if you had the cash for it, which I didn't) as much as a whopping 64KB! If I recall it shipped with 5KB or 10KB. Ooooh! :) "

That's a humongous overkill considering few, if not any, applications use up 32gbs of RAM. But if you're an computer/tech enthusiast then I'll leave the big boys' stuff to the big boys and play with my toy rigs. :) "

If you're doing a lot of media editing, 16 or 32gb is definitely not too much and can all be beneficial. Or in my particular case, compiling very large code bases while using a central machine to run multiple linux and solaris guest OS environments for some very basic testing or running XEN environments on the solaris box to reproduce actual full customer deployment environments (entire LDAP deployments, Identity deployments, communications deployments, etc) for debugging without having to have multiple physical machines.   Even just running VMWare on a machine can eat up a ton of memory. Let's say you run a linux guest and maybe a windows guest. And lets say you allocate 2gb to each system. Well, there's 4gb right there. Plus whatever you allocate for the virtual video cards. And whatever your actual host OS requires. It can add up. Still, for gaming and such... using Vista or Windows 7 . . . I can't imagine using anything less than say 6gb or 8gb. Considering how cheap RAM is and mobos hold a lot of ram these days, it truly is worth jamming them full of as much as you can (though 16gb is probably way overkill, granted...!).  Hell, I keep pushing for more RAM on my T5140 as when I'm dealing with large data sets (in the hundreds of gigabytes), 32gb is actually a hinderance and can involve a ton of paging. One of these days my expense request will go through (since we make the damn things, after all.... argh!). "

• Mobo - Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
• CPU - AMD Athlonx XP 2500+ (Overclocked to 2.2 ghz)
• GPU - ATI Radeon X800 XL AGP 256 MB
• RAM - 1 GB (2x 512 MB dual channel)
• PSU - OCZ somethin.. 470 Watts i think. (Fingerprint heavy)
• Audio - Creative Soundblaster Live 5.1