I'm not afraid of upgrading my laptop. I just wish that for once in my life I'd start off with one slot of total RAM (16x1) instead of two slots with half the RAM (8x2). There may be a slight (or major) speed advantage to pairing like this, but it's always a bummer to throw perfectly fine RAM sticks into a drawer when I upgrade my PC.
Yeah, I was glad upon cracking mine open to discover it had 1x16 instead of 2x8, so I was easily able to upgrade it.
When memory prices are low, I tend to replace whatever stuff is in laptops I get with faster stuff, especially if it has an IGP.
Practical advantage is often virtually non-existent if your laptop has a dedicated GPU, but quite major for most IGPs.
Practical advantage is often virtually non-existent if your laptop has a dedicated GPU, but quite major for most IGPs.
For me it was necessary, as I was getting crashes due to running out of memory, but again, I tend to have a bunch of memory intensive use cases, so it's going to depend on what you tend to run as "general use", YMMV.
For me "General Use" would be office use (word, Excel, outlook or equivalents), surfing the internet, maybe light video editing in moviemaker or something, maybe casual gaming.
Certainly I upgraded to 32gb a while back but couldn't see any big difference, so I downgraded back to 16gb when I needed to build a PC for my Partner and re-deployed some of the memory. I didn't notice any difference. To be honest one of my PCs has only 8Gb and it still get by for most purposes. Although it's starting to suck at gaming due to an AMD Athlon X4 processor and R9 270 2Gb. Still, it's good enough for most games on low at the TVs resolution (720p, I think).
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Memory that isn't being used doesn't do anything.
You only need more if you have reason to suspect you'll fill it at some point. The difference between n GiB and 2n or 10n, is zero, all other things being equal, if n is itself enough to hold what you need immediate access to.
I still recommend 16 or 32 GiB for most new builds, because it's relatively cheap, and it will let most people do everything they want, and most of it at the same time, without having to worry about memory. Most people could certainly get by on less, or even a lot less, with varying degrees of inconvenience.
Most of those who need more know they need more and have some special use case in mind. I would need about 500GiB of memory to use the full fat RNA databases for some of the sequence alignment software my wife uses, but we can skate by with 64GiB if we cull low quality sequences and are willing to run less exhaustive searches.
You only need more if you have reason to suspect you'll fill it at some point. The difference between n GiB and 2n or 10n, is zero, all other things being equal, if n is itself enough to hold what you need immediate access to.
I still recommend 16 or 32 GiB for most new builds, because it's relatively cheap, and it will let most people do everything they want, and most of it at the same time, without having to worry about memory. Most people could certainly get by on less, or even a lot less, with varying degrees of inconvenience.
Most of those who need more know they need more and have some special use case in mind. I would need about 500GiB of memory to use the full fat RNA databases for some of the sequence alignment software my wife uses, but we can skate by with 64GiB if we cull low quality sequences and are willing to run less exhaustive searches.
Fairly baseline usage for me, but that's why I got myself a workhorse laptop like the GL702ZC a couple of years back.
The memory upgrade definitely proved necessary for my specific use case
The memory upgrade definitely proved necessary for my specific use case
I wonder if there is a (probably theoretical) argument that a machine could go slower with more memory sticks? - in theory at least the more-populated DRAM bank would run hotter because there's less airflow. I don't think DRAM thermally throttles like CPU/GPUs do, so it's probably not a real effect. But it's a thought.
Real world. If all you needed was 16Gb, for example, downgrading from 3200Mhz ram to 2333Mhz RAM in order to stretch to 32Gb might actually be counter-productive.
Real world. If all you needed was 16Gb, for example, downgrading from 3200Mhz ram to 2333Mhz RAM in order to stretch to 32Gb might actually be counter-productive.
Many platforms default to lower memory clocks as number of ranks of memory per channel increases. Sometimes these reductions are significant.
DRAM doesn't typically thermal throttle the way a CPU, GPU, or SSD does, but they do have temperature dependent refresh intervals at the more extreme ends of operating temperature. For example, past 85C most DRAM is specified to refresh twice as often, which does reduce performance because more time is spent refreshing rather than accessing data.
Yes, and clock speed isn't everything either.
My 5820K system, for example, has the fastest memory that is practical for me to run in it 24/7. It's a batch of old Micron ICs that will do 2667 with very tight timings. I could potentially find the same ICs on some double sided memory, but the extra ranks would mean more strain on the memory controller and hotter running DIMMs, meaning it would be unlikely I'd be able to run them at the same timings. I could also buy memory capable of higher clocks, but the platform does not handle higher clocks well, and I'd have to loosen timings so much that most DDR4-3200 would be slower than the memory I'm using at DDR4-2667.
On my new Ryzen 3900X SFF system, I wanted 64GiB of memory and only had two DIMM slots to work with. I sacrificed considerable memory performance and infinity fabric performance for the extra density. I was able to get much better than stock performance out of the OEM Samsung sticks I purchased (DDR4-2667 CL20 that I run at 3266 CL17), but the same amount of money could have bought me 16 or 32GiB of DDR4-3600 or 3800 at CL14 to 16.
Noob, I remember the good ol' days when 16 KB was considered an obscene amount of RAM
Noob my Arx, my first memory expansion ever was one of these:Noob, I remember the good ol' days when 16 KB was considered an obscene amount of RAM
8 gb here and never short on memory. When playing ED it is only using 4.4GB. Yes if you have more memory Windows will claim it. Not that it is really used tho.
And don't disable your swap file. Or are you suggesting you know more then MS about operating systems and computer hardware. it is there for a reason. Not just because it is a thing from the past.
And don't disable your swap file. Or are you suggesting you know more then MS about operating systems and computer hardware. it is there for a reason. Not just because it is a thing from the past.
My family's first computer was one aimed at high-end programmers, with a whopping 64KB. 4Mhz Z80, the works. Adjusted for inflation it cost the same in 1984 as my current laptop cost in 2018Noob, I remember the good ol' days when 16 KB was considered an obscene amount of RAM
64gb here, and it gets gobbled up by a highly modified Cities:Skylines.
Yeah, I still get out of memory crashes on Cities: Skylines with my laptop's 32. That thing is basically 30-50 memory hogs running into my RAM....
I run with 8Gb, I only feel memory is lacking when using just about the last drop on hash tables for my chess engines but I'm sure it doesn't help them much.
![[VR] optimal_909](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/109/109067.jpg?1553781733){kind=avatar}
Slightly off topic, but I just checked MSI afterburner after a session of Elite in VR, and it used a bit over 10gb of the GPU VRAM. Never-ever anything came close, most titles rarely use more than 5-, maybe 6gb.