phor2zero Posted October 1, 2006 Share Posted October 1, 2006 I'm upgrading my Socket 939 system. I've just purchased an Athlon64 FX-60 Dual Core and a second 7800GTX. I currently have 2GB of ram. Unfortunately the price of DDR-400 has actually gone up since a couple of years ago, so I'm iffy about whether I should double it to 4GB. With the 2GB my XP system never even uses the swap drive. I'm not sure if I'm going to be installing Vista on this system or not (no DirectX10 cards). Is there a good reason to upgrade to 4GB? Any advice? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pcgamer Posted October 1, 2006 Share Posted October 1, 2006 you really don't need 4 gigs if you don't do heavy video/photo editing. 4 GB is overkill IMO atleast at this moment in Q4 2006 7800GTX is a rip off card IMO, wonder why you bought it. 7900GT is equal to its performance level and like half the price (atleast here in canada) 7900GTX is a way better deal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phor2zero Posted October 1, 2006 Author Share Posted October 1, 2006 thanx pcgamer. The 7900 didn't exist when I bought my first 7800gtx. Unfortunately in order to do SLI, I need to use a matching 7800 card. I found a 7800GTX for less than US$300, which is far cheaper than buying 2 7900's (or one and throwing away my 7800) Besides, my LCD monitor will only go up to 1440x900@60hz.... since that's the max resolution and framerate I can get, it doesn't make much sense to purchase 2 7950GX2's! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pcgamer Posted October 1, 2006 Share Posted October 1, 2006 ah ha! because those 7800GTXs here in canada are about 30 $ more then the 7900GTX your price is great for it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vandetta Posted October 1, 2006 Share Posted October 1, 2006 Wow, if you upgrade to 4GB RAM I wonder how fast your PCs will be.. I think 2GB is enough but if you have much money, why not give a try Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted October 1, 2006 Share Posted October 1, 2006 I'm upgrading my Socket 939 system. I've just purchased an Athlon64 FX-60 Dual Core and a second 7800GTX. I currently have 2GB of ram. Unfortunately the price of DDR-400 has actually gone up since a couple of years ago, so I'm iffy about whether I should double it to 4GB. With the 2GB my XP system never even uses the swap drive. I'm not sure if I'm going to be installing Vista on this system or not (no DirectX10 cards). Is there a good reason to upgrade to 4GB? Any advice? Ittl be better, but you will want an x64 operating system or else the system will not see all of it. so yea, id upgrade to maybe xp x64 and then get the extra ram. max oh, and ps, love the personal pic mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm .25 philly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
br0adband Posted October 2, 2006 Share Posted October 2, 2006 The common myth that continues to perpetuate to this day is: "I have <xxx> amount of RAM, Windows never touches my hard drive" or something like "I turned off my swap file, and it's faster..." While you can continue deceiving yourself into believing this, there are thousands of websites out there that will present data that says you're seeing things that simply don't exist and aren't back up by hard evidence. You can't turn off the page file - read that again. You can't, no matter what you think, what site you read, what hack you pulled out of a hat, etc. Windows is an operating system written like all the others since the 386 processor was invented. It's designed from the first line of code to work with the virtual memory subsystems and capabilities of the Intel 386 processor architecture and everything that has happened since that processor was invented. While you may believe Windows doesn't have a swap file "because I turned it off," you are very much in error, sorry. Windows always has a page file, albeit sometimes it only needs a small one. You simply can not disable the page file, period. Even Microsoft has information in the Knowledge Base about this. I sure wish people would stop messing with this stuff and just use the damned computer. Yes, if you have 1GB or more of RAM and you set a really small pagefile size you'll notice some benefits, snappier performance, etc. Same thing with 2GB or more. But Windows creates a pagefile, you just can't see it anymore because it's not in the root directory as pagefile.sys. But it has one, always, and always will. Your only possibility if you want to get max performance from paging activity would be to put the pagefile on a RAMdisk, something that until recently was thought to be impossible. Not anymore. www.superspeed.com offers a RAMdisk, the best one there is, that will allow you to place your pagefile directly on a RAMdisk. With 2GB of RAM, you could make a 512MB RAMdisk and put the pagefile on it and your machine will scream. I've been doing this kind of tweaking machines for decades. I can take any machine on the planet and get you a 20% boost in performance over and above whatever you or the system builder/maker did in 30 mins or less. Alienware and Falcon and Voodoo and even Dell (who owns Alienware) and now HP who owns Voodoo think their PCs are fast. They're wrong. Because I can make 'em much much faster. So, install Windows, and use it. Don't spend days and weeks of wasted time to eek out a few percentage points of performance that you really can only quantify in benchmarks which waste even more time - use the computer, don't let it use you. and a whole lotta spare change... bb Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted October 2, 2006 Share Posted October 2, 2006 The common myth that continues to perpetuate to this day is: "I have <xxx> amount of RAM, Windows never touches my hard drive" or something like "I turned off my swap file, and it's faster..." While you can continue deceiving yourself into believing this, there are thousands of websites out there that will present data that says you're seeing things that simply don't exist and aren't back up by hard evidence. You can't turn off the page file - read that again. You can't, no matter what you think, what site you read, what hack you pulled out of a hat, etc. Windows is an operating system written like all the others since the 386 processor was invented. It's designed from the first line of code to work with the virtual memory subsystems and capabilities of the Intel 386 processor architecture and everything that has happened since that processor was invented. While you may believe Windows doesn't have a swap file "because I turned it off," you are very much in error, sorry. Windows always has a page file, albeit sometimes it only needs a small one. You simply can not disable the page file, period. Even Microsoft has information in the Knowledge Base about this. I sure wish people would stop messing with this stuff and just use the damned computer. Yes, if you have 1GB or more of RAM and you set a really small pagefile size you'll notice some benefits, snappier performance, etc. Same thing with 2GB or more. But Windows creates a pagefile, you just can't see it anymore because it's not in the root directory as pagefile.sys. But it has one, always, and always will. Your only possibility if you want to get max performance from paging activity would be to put the pagefile on a RAMdisk, something that until recently was thought to be impossible. Not anymore. www.superspeed.com offers a RAMdisk, the best one there is, that will allow you to place your pagefile directly on a RAMdisk. With 2GB of RAM, you could make a 512MB RAMdisk and put the pagefile on it and your machine will scream. I've been doing this kind of tweaking machines for decades. I can take any machine on the planet and get you a 20% boost in performance over and above whatever you or the system builder/maker did in 30 mins or less. Alienware and Falcon and Voodoo and even Dell (who owns Alienware) and now HP who owns Voodoo think their PCs are fast. They're wrong. Because I can make 'em much much faster. So, install Windows, and use it. Don't spend days and weeks of wasted time to eek out a few percentage points of performance that you really can only quantify in benchmarks which waste even more time - use the computer, don't let it use you. and a whole lotta spare change... bb ramdisks will lose all data if the power supply is stopped... and ram helps more because it is usable by programs, you cant install a game on ramdisk or a program (well you could, but youd have to reinstall it everytime the power goes out, or the surgeprotector does.) max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phor2zero Posted October 3, 2006 Author Share Posted October 3, 2006 Interesting stuff. I haven't actually done much tweaking to my page file. I just mentioned it's infrequent use to point out that perhaps the 2GB of ram I already have is not even being fully utilized. I looked at the RamDisk product, wow it's expensive! It's also designed for Server 2003. No mention of if it would work for XP. (I've found a "trial" version I'm downloading now) So you seem to be saying that if I sacrificed 512MB of my 2GB of ram for a ramdrive, and set my swapfile to use it, I'd be better off than buying another 2GB of ram. side note: losing my swapfile data when shutting down or having a power loss is actually a plus from a security perspective. EDIT: can't find any "trial" version anywhere. so it's all hypothetical anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted October 4, 2006 Share Posted October 4, 2006 Interesting stuff. I haven't actually done much tweaking to my page file. I just mentioned it's infrequent use to point out that perhaps the 2GB of ram I already have is not even being fully utilized. I looked at the RamDisk product, wow it's expensive! It's also designed for Server 2003. No mention of if it would work for XP. (I've found a "trial" version I'm downloading now) So you seem to be saying that if I sacrificed 512MB of my 2GB of ram for a ramdrive, and set my swapfile to use it, I'd be better off than buying another 2GB of ram. side note: losing my swapfile data when shutting down or having a power loss is actually a plus from a security perspective. EDIT: can't find any "trial" version anywhere. so it's all hypothetical anyway. a trial of what? the ramdisk? or the os, ether way it would do you no good as you can not test it without the actual ramdisk... in witch case it would be senceless to test it since u allready bought it... but anyway i pm'd u about the os trial max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Metrogirl Posted October 4, 2006 Share Posted October 4, 2006 My , for what it's worth. I've spent a lot of time with hardware trying to improve performance, with some success. My main desktop machine is stuffed with RAM, overclocked and using striped drives, blah blah. It's also noticeably slower than a machine I've recently built with a slower processor, half the RAM and a single SATA 150 HDD. Why? The only answer I can offer is a combination of WinRot and the firewall and antivirus I'm running on the desktop machine. Symantec's AV really does slow things down when you use the autoprotect feature (turned on by default) as it checks every file and directory you, or an application, opens. The firewall also checks applications against its database to see if they've been modified since last run. Although the time taken is small, it's there. If the system has to go and find some file for its check or comparison, the delay is going to be noticeable. But the biggest killer has to be WinRot. You know, registry bloat, myriad installed applications, uninstalled apps that have left garbage everywhere, device drivers for dongles and licensing systems, services which are waiting for me to start this app or that app or plug in this device. I defrag, I run a registry checker/compact program, I kill services and get rid of stuff I don't use. It helps, but I've found the only solution to getting the speed you're expecting from your hardware is to backup and re-install regularly. Seriously. Having said all of that, I think 2GB of RAM is plenty for practically everything you would need to do normally. Huge video-editing or rendering tasks can use more, but the difference isn't really worth spending the $$$/£££ to achieve it. On the other hand, less than 1GB is going to make for a slow system no matter what you do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KJY9 Posted October 4, 2006 Share Posted October 4, 2006 .........I defrag, I run a registry checker/compact program, I kill services and get rid of stuff I don't use. It helps, but I've found the only solution to getting the speed you're expecting from your hardware is to backup and re-install regularly. Seriously. ....... That's why I use ghost on all my clients machines as well as my personal machines. You start with a clean and formatted HDD. You install WinXP, then drivers, then updates, then all your software. Defrag after cleaning all temp directories and then ghost it to another partition or secondary drive. Then when WinRot sets in (and it will), you spend 15 minutes ghosting back your pristene install, instead of hours on end formatting and reinstalling. Just my .02 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted October 4, 2006 Share Posted October 4, 2006 That's why I use ghost on all my clients machines as well as my personal machines.You start with a clean and formatted HDD. You install WinXP, then drivers, then updates, then all your software. Defrag after cleaning all temp directories and then ghost it to another partition or secondary drive. Then when WinRot sets in (and it will), you spend 15 minutes ghosting back your pristene install, instead of hours on end formatting and reinstalling. Just my .02 Teheh, yep, xcept i dont bother backing up, i just wipe and start again max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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