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The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition
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AfterDawn Addict
7 product reviews
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6. January 2012 @ 02:30 |
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You sure that laptop will support 16Gb? While the physical form factor will obviously accommodate 2 x 8Gb modules, the board may simply not be programmed, or simply able to handle that much memory. While I don't doubt the existence of laptops with insane memory abilities, it does seem uncommon.
To delete, or not to delete. THAT is the question! This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 6. January 2012 @ 02:32
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6. January 2012 @ 09:17 |
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It's not uncommon for business lappy's and Acer states it does, although they could be wrong. Even the higher end, gaming lappy's will support things like dedicated video and more RAM so I don't doubt it but since the mfg says it does and it has two RAM bays tells me that it is more than probable it does.
At any rate jumping up to 8GB modules increases the price 3 fold so I'll wait to upgrade it down the road.
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AfterDawn Addict
7 product reviews
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7. January 2012 @ 03:20 |
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Excellent!!! I forgot how nice it was to have 8Gb of ram :D Go ahead and laugh, you over achievers! I think 8Gb should be plenty for me for a while. But if X264 continues to saturate my Ram, I may double it yet again. Provided newegg restocks them. They're currently sold out :(
Once again, the bios/board doesn't start them at XMP(or rated specifications). I manually clocked them to their rated specifications. It seems really smooth so far. Windows seemed to boot noticeably quicker. My hard drive is acting really frisky too! Applications are loading really fast. I'm a very happy guy. I still want an SSD, and a 6 - 8 core processor though :p
Mushkin has once again, impressed the hell out of me! I wish I benched the last ram for comparison purposes now. I do have to open up the case again tomorrow though ;)
To delete, or not to delete. THAT is the question! |
Senior Member
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7. January 2012 @ 06:25 |
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spam!!! reported
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AfterDawn Addict
15 product reviews
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7. January 2012 @ 13:22 |
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Quote:
Mushkin has once again, impressed the hell out of me! I wish I benched the last ram for comparison purposes now. I do have to open up the case again tomorrow though ;)
Nice! I have been a Mushkin memory fan for years and am currently using a fairly high-end 4GB kit in my Intel rig. Used to use Mushkin exclusively :D I am only using these G.Skill Ripjaws because they came with the board or no board at all! lol. The G.Skill has been surprisingly stable though at 1600MHz so I guess I should count myself lucky as both board and memory were slightly used.
8GB is more than enough for me. Being primarily a gamer, I could easily be using 4GB right now with minimal consequence. It does make a difference for the small few games that run out of memory on 4GB though. First and foremost in my mind being Crysis, which stutters and freezes terribly in later levels due to running out of memory, even in 32-bit. Running out of memory actually causes a memory leak and 8GB fixes this magically. Other than the few exceptions, I haven't noticed much difference moving to 8GB. The peace of mind from the extra overhead sure is nice though. I rarely do anything demanding bar gaming and folding@home.
I do spend the majority of my free time on my PC though, as do my closest friends. So it might as well be overbuilt. I have resolved to stick with AM3 for now, and get a second-hand 1090T. Skyrim and Battlefield 3 were going to sway my decision on Sandybridge and they did just that. They both run perfectly, so a 1090T would be icing on the cake. BTW Battlefield 3 DOES use 6 cores. And for the most part, an OC'd 1090T is faster and better at gaming than Bulldozer.
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 4GHz(20 x 200) 1.5v 3000NB 2000HT, Corsair Hydro H110 w/ 4 x 140mm 1500RPM fans Push/Pull, Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5, 8GB(2 x 4GB) G.Skill RipJaws DDR3-1600 @ 1600MHz CL9 1.55v, Gigabyte GTX760 OC 4GB(1170/1700), Corsair 750HX
Detailed PC Specs: http://my.afterdawn.com/estuansis/blog_entry.cfm/11388This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 7. January 2012 @ 13:34
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AfterDawn Addict
7 product reviews
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7. January 2012 @ 13:38 |
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I seem to recall GTA IV ran better with 8Gb of Ram. I imagine this is the case with multiple games. I also imagine it's vital that I upgrade my GPU in february. My GPU really just doesn't have enough memory. It's also becoming quickly dated! More than likely, it will be Ati this time.
To delete, or not to delete. THAT is the question! |
AfterDawn Addict
15 product reviews
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7. January 2012 @ 13:40 |
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The GTX260 216 was a capable card for its time so I'm not surprised it's lasted so long. An upgrade will be well deserved.
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 4GHz(20 x 200) 1.5v 3000NB 2000HT, Corsair Hydro H110 w/ 4 x 140mm 1500RPM fans Push/Pull, Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5, 8GB(2 x 4GB) G.Skill RipJaws DDR3-1600 @ 1600MHz CL9 1.55v, Gigabyte GTX760 OC 4GB(1170/1700), Corsair 750HX
Detailed PC Specs: http://my.afterdawn.com/estuansis/blog_entry.cfm/11388
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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7. January 2012 @ 16:04 |
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Originally posted by omegaman7:
I seem to recall GTA IV ran better with 8Gb of Ram. I imagine this is the case with multiple games. I also imagine it's vital that I upgrade my GPU in february. My GPU really just doesn't have enough memory. It's also becoming quickly dated! More than likely, it will be Ati this time.
GTA4 will see a system use 6GB of RAM quite easily, so that's not surprising.
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AfterDawn Addict
7 product reviews
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7. January 2012 @ 17:14 |
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Good coding. Much like windows 7. I've noticed when applications heavily use Ram, that windows 7 loosens up its grip on the Ram. X264 for instance seems to use a significant amount. Adobe photoshop uses a pretty large amount too. Though I can tweak settings of course. But allowing more ram usage is beneficial. History states for instance. Probably less chance of a memory related crash too ;)
Time to install some games! It's been far too long LOL!
It seemed to run generally the same with 4Gb. Perhaps slightly diminished. But it didn't greatly affect it.
To delete, or not to delete. THAT is the question! This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 7. January 2012 @ 17:19
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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7. January 2012 @ 18:50 |
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Surely you mean bad coding, that it needs that much memory?
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AfterDawn Addict
7 product reviews
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7. January 2012 @ 19:51 |
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Using memory is good. So when it's coded to use more, I call that intelligent. It's adaptive based on how much memory you have. Referencing memory, is much quicker than referencing a mechanical hard drive. As I'm sure you'd agree ;)
To delete, or not to delete. THAT is the question! |
AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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7. January 2012 @ 19:55 |
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Wasting memory from uncompressed textures is not good coding. GTA4 is widely accepted as one of the worst programmed console ports of the era. I'm all for programs making use of lots of memory, but there really aren't many cases where you get short-changed in games because they haven't decided to use enough memory.
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AfterDawn Addict
7 product reviews
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7. January 2012 @ 19:59 |
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And then you go and make a valid point! LOL!
Wow, I forgot just how much space GTA IV took up. 15Gb at present. I believe all updates are in place. Must be, because I don't recall AA settings last time I ran it :D I could easily fill the drive with applications and games I like. If I have an SSD along side this drive, I would be more comfortable though.
To delete, or not to delete. THAT is the question! |
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7. January 2012 @ 21:20 |
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He does for the way he is thinking, but he is wrong in your example, when transcoding you want to use as much resources as possible in order to speed up the process. You can set priority and memory usage when processing A/V but unless you are going to need the PC for other things while transcoding why wouldn't you want it to use all resources. It's a no brainier really.
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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8. January 2012 @ 15:45 |
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Sorry, I must have missed a bit here. What does GTA4 have to do with transcoding?
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AfterDawn Addict
7 product reviews
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8. January 2012 @ 17:56 |
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Memory usage overall. I think he means he WANTS programs to utilize memory as much as possible. Not really saying saturate it, just utilize it. It's certainly better bandwidth than a conventional hard drive ;)
Well that tears it! Apparently I can't run the memory at exact specifications. I had to change the bank cycle time to 34 clocks vs 31 XMP. I got 3 blue screens in under 24hrs. Oddly, it would only happen when running utorrent. And only referencing a certain download. Rather weird. I ran memtest86+. An error occurred :( Changed to 34T, no more errors. Now to see how it feels about that file...
To delete, or not to delete. THAT is the question! |
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8. January 2012 @ 21:55 |
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Originally posted by sammorris:
Sorry, I must have missed a bit here. What does GTA4 have to do with transcoding?
Kevin said,
Quote:
I've noticed when applications heavily use Ram, that windows 7 loosens up its grip on the Ram. X264 for instance seems to use a significant amount.
Knowing that he is into DVD & BD Rebuilder I thought or think he is talking in that structure. If not just playing an HD movie isn't that labor intensive so it didn't fit for me logically.
Now Adobe and GTA4 are examples of what you were saying as they are horrible programmers and waste and backwards programming is their motto.
Actually looking back at it you more correct with your statement as I fixated to the x264 aspect even though I totally got but ignored the Adobe thing.
Sorry Sam,
Stevo
BLU-RAY MEDIA
Kevin,
I'm going back through my old Blu-ray backups and most of the 2+ year old RITEK-BR2-000 movies have gone bad but like I said the Philip's based media is still good fortunately. I think I only had 25qty of the Ritek and have found over ten bad now, I hope I didn't buy more of that media but may have it was so long ago I don't remember the point that I determined Ritek BDR's were crap.
Oh, you are right my National Treasure is on DVD not HD I guess I'll have to rent the Blu-ray darn it! LOL
It's probably time to get some water-shield BD's and backup my whole collection as they have come down in price and are reasonable for the most part.
Stevo
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 9. January 2012 @ 16:08
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Senior Member
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19. January 2012 @ 05:08 |
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Installed my new but slow SSD and have been using it for the last couple days. Had little problems installing with AHCI on my Gigabyte GA-880GA-UD3H (Rev 2.2) other than windows install is extremely slow if you don't use the floppy drivers to install. Actually the BIOS gave me the most headaches getting it configured properly. At first I didn't run my burner in AHCI but changed it after the install, I had it in IDE mode originally. This cause headaches in Windows Device Manager but after figuring which devices needed the RAID drivers, there were two in my case, everything is now up and working as it should.
I bootup now in about 5 seconds which is very sweet and I really like the SanDisk 120GB. I'm just using it for Windows and have my profile folders (Desktop, Downloads, My Documents, & so on) and Program Files on my normal HDD(s). I'm going to leave it this way for now and as the SSD wears and shrinks in time I should have plenty of space for some time. I use to turn on my PC and go do something but now I wait and watch it boot since I'm intrigued with the new speed of bootup.
Russ,
Just to show you how numbering/stats can be decieving I used AIDA64 and did a Random Read Test on both my SATA II SSD & SATA III HDD to compare against. Each are on the same controller, a SATA III (6GB) controller, so that everything is fair and somewhat equal. If you look at just the throughput numbers there isn't a big difference between them as the SSD's Average read time is 177.5MB/s and the HDD's is 105.2MB/s which is ruffly 1.7x faster. However the true factor here was the time it took to complete the test for each device, the SSD took 1:10 to complete but the HDD took 15:48 minutes which is huge!
Another interesting factor was SanDisk states reads of 270MB/s but in my testing I could only hit 242MB/s. This could be marketing nonsense but it also could be my controllers fault as well.
So in summation numbers don't always tell the true story unless you have all of the facts.
Best Regards,
Stevo
P.S. I see Kevin is backing SOPA again. LOL
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sytyguy
Senior Member
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19. January 2012 @ 06:23 |
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AfterDawn Addict
7 product reviews
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19. January 2012 @ 12:24 |
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sytyguy NICE! Can't wait to join the SSD club :p
To delete, or not to delete. THAT is the question! |
AfterDawn Addict
15 product reviews
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19. January 2012 @ 14:24 |
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Impressive to say the least. In lieu of my putting off Sandybridge or similar for a while, I have been exploring my options for SSDs. That's where the large improvements are. Ideally ~128GB would be perfect for me. Currently at ~150GB usage on my 250GB OS partition, but this is also including ALL of my Steam files currently installed which is a hefty 102GB on its own. Will be transferring that over shortly. 128GB would leave me plenty of room for both my OS and a bunch of select HDD whoring games.
Oblivion unpacked from 6 archives at 7GB to some thousands of small files at 10GB I'm looking at you.
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 4GHz(20 x 200) 1.5v 3000NB 2000HT, Corsair Hydro H110 w/ 4 x 140mm 1500RPM fans Push/Pull, Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5, 8GB(2 x 4GB) G.Skill RipJaws DDR3-1600 @ 1600MHz CL9 1.55v, Gigabyte GTX760 OC 4GB(1170/1700), Corsair 750HX
Detailed PC Specs: http://my.afterdawn.com/estuansis/blog_entry.cfm/11388
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 19. January 2012 @ 14:29
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Senior Member
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19. January 2012 @ 15:06 |
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@sytyguy
You definitely get better throughput with the SATA3 SSD's even though it isn't 2x(+) increase. I've looked at the manufactures information & ratings and it does make a difference to go full SATA3. I'll upgrade this SSD to yours or Russ's and use this one in one of my families PC's or NB's.
Very nice.... :O
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AfterDawn Addict
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19. January 2012 @ 21:04 |
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Mr-Movies,
My speed continues to improve, so I guess it's not done learning yet.
We don't have the same software, but it's all I have. It's still in iDE mode too!
Russ
GigaByte 990FXA-UD5 - AMD FX-8320 @4.0GHz @1.312v - Corsair H-60 liquid CPU Cooler - 4x4 GB GSkill RipJaws DDR3/1866 Cas8, 8-9-9-24 - Corsair 400-R Case - OCZ FATAL1TY 550 watt Modular PSU - Intel 330 120GB SATA III SSD - WD Black 500GB SATA III - WD black 1 TB Sata III - WD Black 500GB SATA II - 2 Asus DRW-24B1ST DVD-Burner - Sony 420W 5.1 PL-II Suround Sound - GigaByte GTX550/1GB 970 Mhz Video - Asus VE247H 23.6" HDMI 1080p Monitor
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21. January 2012 @ 08:56 |
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Russ,
There is something wrong with your test metrics that I didn't pickup on originally? Write speeds should be less than Reads. Also it is not a good idea to perform write tests on an SSD in a Benchmark fashion, which is why I didn't post that in my test.
Stevo
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sytyguy
Senior Member
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21. January 2012 @ 10:27 |
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Russ, that is one fast SSD you have, I don't even compare.
Mr-Movies is correct it appears, your writes are skewed.
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