Is there such thing as too much ram?

[Peegee]

A short bit of background. My motherboard has been a piece of junk for months now. After a rather eventful installation, it failed to function under 'normal' installation methodologies. In other words, I needed to prop up a corner of the thing in order for the 'power' to function. Recently it managed to get so bad that in order for me to power it, I was bending it a good 15 cm. I'm not kidding. I have a video card with bent metal panels (the part that you screw on to fasten) to prove it. I'm worried about it a little, but I hope I can fix it with a (set of?) pylers, which I don't even have :p

Anyway the point is that I plan to buy a new mobo and processor. Is 2.8 gig (intel) a good choice right now, considering 3.0 gig is just out and costs a good 500$ CDN? Also, as the topic states, how much ram is 'too much'? I currently have a gig of PC133 sd(?) ram. There's a good chance the mobo I will buy will have 2 sdram slots, and 2 ddr ram slots (if not, then I'll use the ram on this 933 mhz processor comp and be happy anyway). Since I already have a gig of ram, will adding some more (another 512 or 1 gig) improve performance all that much? I know ram *does* provide some performance boost: this computer used to have 64 megs of ram and was a piece of junk, but now it functions pretty much like a normal computer does :D

So yeah, more ram = good? Also 2.8 gig = good?

[Dr Unne]

More RAM never hurts, it's a matter of how much money you want to spend/waste. After a certain point, you're just not going to be able to utilize all the RAM on your system unless you're doing something berserk that sucks up resources (or using a Windows program that leaks memory, or using a Windows kernel that leaks memory for that matter...). I have 512 MB of RAM, and in Linux I touch my swap partition about once a week, if that, which means that I'm never using all my RAM. When your RAM fills up, you start using "virtual memory", which means you start swapping data between the harddrive and RAM so that the CPU thinks you have much more RAM than you do (the alternative being your computer freezing or refusing to do anything until RAM is freed i.e. until you kill some programs; that wouldn't be good). Swapping to the HD is extremely, extremely slow (orders of magnitude slow) compared to using memory already in RAM, and more RAM will save you from swapping; that's about it.

I'm pretty sure DDR RAM is made to work with 2 chips of equal capacity and performance though. One 1 gig chip is worse than 2 512 MB chips, so far as DDR RAM goes. Keep that in mind. If you buy 2 512 MB chips, and someday you want to upgrade, you'll have to trash them both. Might be good to spring for 2 1 gig chips if you think you ever want to upgrade in the future. But honestly, what the heck do you need 2 gigs of RAM for? Unless you're running a server or something.

2.8 GHz is ridiculously more than you'll likely need in the next couple years. What do you need that much CPU power for? Playing Solitaire? Booting Windows in 25 seconds instead of 35? A 550 was almost good enough for me. I don't plan to upgrade from this 2.6 GHz for a long long time. It's just not worth the money. My computer far exceeds the requirements for everything I'm likely to do in the foreseeable future.

[Peegee]

The occasional video re-encoding requires a fast processor, but you are right: I don't need a 2.8. A 2.6 is way more than I need, and I'll probably go for that (it would be cheaper than a 2.8 by what, 100$ after taxes?). As for 'boot time', I do find that sort of important, but you did put a lot into perspective.

I play a lot of video games, and it's also sort of annoying to have to set my video players to 'high' priority in order to play video (anime) without lagging or chopping. Then there's what I usually use the internet for. A 933 (what I'm using now) is great for surfing and chatting, and if I were only doing that I wouldn't be buying a new computer.

So I think I'll hold off the ram purchase for my main computer for now. I'll pick up a 512 for my otherwise virtually ram-less computer (it has 64 when I'm not swapping ram chips), and look into what a 2.6 gig processor with a motherboard costs. Thanks for the actually useful advice.

[crono_logical]

Do note the limit of virtual memory a 32-bit machine can address (RAM + page/swap space on the HD) is only 4 GB, although I don't think you'll be getting or needing that much RAM :p

[Peegee]

4 gigs is too much; I set mine for 2 gigs :D

Oh, I just realised something: what percentage of your actual ram should the virtual ram setting be?

[Yamaneko]

Isn't it half of what you actually have? But I think after you have a gig of RAM it's not necessary to have virtual RAM.

[Dr Unne]

In Windoze, Windoze will pick the size of your swapfile itself. You may as well let it. In Linux people usually go with 1.5 times your RAM I think. The more RAM you have, the less you need though. I only NEED about 64MB of swap myself, since I have enough RAM that I hardly ever touch it. With 2 gigs of RAM, it doesn't even matter.

[crono_logical]

I've set my Windows to have a smaller page file than RAM installed, only because I wanted the pagefile on another drive and don't need one as big as Windows might otherwise allocate. Depends what you do as to how much you need - I sometimes use as much as 1.5 GB between the page and RAM together, though I doubt many other people around here do.