Modern Computing Discussion

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Yesterday I decided to open up my PC to see if it needed cleaning, fortunately it didn't, but since it was already open, I decided to conduct a little experiment by removing 16 of the 32 gigs of RAM to see if there was any appreciable difference... I didn't notice any.  So I plugged the memory back in and went on my merry way, but this brings up a question to you guys who've upgraded your PC's...  Did you notice any difference when you doubled your memory?  If so, under what conditions?

[RickR]

3 minutes ago, - Ω - said:

Yesterday I decided to open up my PC to see if it needed cleaning, fortunately it didn't, but since it was already open, I decided to conduct a little experiment by removing 16 of the 32 gigs of RAM to see if there was any appreciable difference... I didn't notice any.  So I plugged the memory back in and went on my merry way, but this brings up a question to you guys who've upgraded your PC's...  Did you notice any difference when you doubled your memory?  If so, under what conditions?

Well, in my work, that move from 16 to 32 GB was hugely helpful.  But that included running a bunch of development environments (Eclipse, SQL Server, Microsoft .NET, etc). 

On my home PC, that 32 GB that I have serves no useful purpose.  I've noticed a speed jump on laptops when you go from 4 to 8 GB.  But I'm not sure if that's due to more memory or the fact that with two sticks, it runs in the "dual" 128 bit mode. 

 

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28 minutes ago, RickR said:

Well, in my work, that move from 16 to 32 GB was hugely helpful.  But that included running a bunch of development environments (Eclipse, SQL Server, Microsoft .NET, etc). 

On my home PC, that 32 GB that I have serves no useful purpose.  I've noticed a speed jump on laptops when you go from 4 to 8 GB.  But I'm not sure if that's due to more memory or the fact that with two sticks, it runs in the "dual" 128 bit mode. 

 

Interesting.  I'm curious, is there some sort of "memory speed test" program out there a person could run on their PC?

[RickR]

The "userbenchmark.com" mentioned in the "old school PC benchmarks" thread does give memory speed scores if you look at the detailed results. 

 

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11 minutes ago, RickR said:

The "userbenchmark.com" mentioned in the "old school PC benchmarks" thread does give memory speed scores if you look at the detailed results. 

 

Yeah, if I'm reading this right, there is not much difference between 16 & 32 speed wise?

 

Edited April 18, 2021 by - Ω -

[RickR]

Well, that's really not what they are measuring.  They are measuring the raw speed of whatever memory you have by reading in blocks of various sizes.  On your system, if you only had 16GB, that 32GB latency would be higher.  But that's not a great real world test. 

Things would get more interesting if you tried a CPU-intensive gaming benchmark.  Some games love more memory (and memory with faster timings). 

 

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1 minute ago, RickR said:

Well, that's really not what they are measuring.  They are measuring the raw speed of whatever memory you have by reading in blocks of various sizes.  On your system, if you only had 16GB, that 32GB latency would be higher.  But that's not a great real world test. 

Things would get more interesting if you tried a CPU-intensive gaming benchmark.  Some games love more memory (and memory with faster timings). 

 

Ahh, I don't really have much on the way of PC games on my computer with the exception of a couple of "classic" steam programs.  Most of my intensive processing is done with video.

[RickR]

6 minutes ago, - Ω - said:

Ahh, I don't really have much on the way of PC games on my computer with the exception of a couple of "classic" steam programs.  Most of my intensive processing is done with video.

Maybe that's a test you can try.  Encode the same video with 16 GB vs 32 GB and time it.  I'll bet there will be a difference.

 

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12 minutes ago, RickR said:

Maybe that's a test you can try.  Encode the same video with 16 GB vs 32 GB and time it.  I'll bet there will be a difference.

 

Yeah, I could, but I'd have to open it up again... ☹️

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Since there is no "Modern Computing Discussion Forum" here (yet) on the site, I thought I'd post my question here.

The setup to the question:  I rotate two Western Digital 25A3 8TB hard drives between my PC and the RPi 4 I have running KODI in another room.  I use two drives in case something happens to one drive I will not lose all my videos.  I also have a rather dog slow Passport 259F that's only 3TB for program, documentation and still photo backups.  Now here's the problem, the Internal drives on the PC, the main drive is a Toshiba Xg5 NVMe PCIe M.2 that is fast as hell, but two small to cram a lot of programs on, so I'm using a rather small Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 2TB drive for programs that I don't use on a daily basis, but I want to augment the internal storage with something fast and of a decent size... to grow into.

<< THIS HARD DRIVE >> seems like a viable option, but knowing that some of you guys here are true experts, I thought I'd ask for some advice/input/alternative(s).  Thanks.