I Just Ordered 32 GB of RAM

[Dr. O]

I'm old, conservative, and a stick in the mud but I am demanding of my PC.
I no longer spin my tires at the stoplight but I might blow the doors off your mother board .
The current box has 128 Gb of RAM, one of Intel's high end CPU's, two SSD and a few Tb of HD's for holding files.
The speed difference it makes right from turning the power on has to be seen to be believed.
Yes, changing your boot drive to an SSD will make a difference.

 

[Caramon13]

I agree with @Dr. O . I too am very demanding on my PC. Some of the newer versions of windows require a base amount of 8 GB of RAM to even function. Will they run with less, sure, but who wants a barely usable computer?

I believe I have about 32GB of RAM in my computer, but I mostly use it for financial stuff and gaming. My boot drive is a RAID 1 (two SSDs) and my applications drive is a RAID 0 volume. For those of you who think, OMG you use a RAID 0 for all your applications, yes I do. I don't honestly care if that drive blows up. I have all my data on a 1 TB slow SATA drive.

I also have a NAS for anything I just want off my computer. The wife and I store all our pictures, etc on it.

All of the above is stored or replicated in one way or another to the cloud. So, even if my computer died today I don't really care. I can grab another hard drive, install windows 10 and by the end of the day be back to where I started with no major loss of information.

 

[flhrci]

RJM62,

POA has spoken! You are hereby directed to upgrade to an SSD based on all the above mentioned benefits!

David

 

[denverpilot]

128GB of RAM is mostly a very expensive space-heater unless you're running multiple virtual machines on a single host. For a desktop machine running a single OS, it's doing nothing but generating heat.

It'll act as a filesystem cache -- AFTER the first read of a file (very little pre-cache going on other than some OS files), so reads will be *marginally* (very marginally) faster than from a fast SSD, but writes have to be atomic.

I suppose if you've taken the time to customize the machine with a RAM disk and pre-copied everything you plan to work on that day into it, you might save a few seconds... NOT including the time to load the thing. The cache algorythms generally do a better job than a human can...

Here's a Mac running an insane amount of stuff... nothing doing heavy number crunching, but there's nearly no app that isn't running in the background, along with multiple browsers and bejillions of tabs on everything that's open...



If I wanted every file I touch all day in the cache, another 16GB would easily cover it.

 

[RJM62]

I'm finding that in my computer's "typical" state, I'm now using 15 to 16 percent of RAM, on average. "Typical" would be both Dreamweaver and Fireworks open (I rarely close either one of them), two or three Web browsers, Mailwasher, and Thunderbird. Photoshop adds about another one to three percent depending on what it's doing. Premiere Pro adds another 20 to 35 percent. I haven't gone over 50 percent running all of them at the same time, even with Premiere Pro doing a transcoding job. So for now, I'm good RAM-wise.

The SSD is till in "probably" status. The CPU is in "maybe" status. I'm in my price-seeking mode now. They're averaging about $30.00 below retail at most of my usual vendors. To me, because that discount seems pretty ubiquitous, the discounted price becomes the base price; and if I don't pay at least 30 percent less than the base price, I feel like I overpaid. It's just a duty of mine. One of my purposes in life is to exert downward pressure on prices. You might say it's a calling.

If I can't find that big a discount, then I'll have to use Plan B: Buy it from either Amazon or Micro Center, use their credit card, and stretch the payments out until right before the interest-free period expires. That way, I feel like I'm screwing either Synchrony or Wells Fargo respectively out of their interest, which partially compensates for my feeling as if I didn't get a good enough price. Any time I can screw a bank, it's a good day.

In fact, the main reason why I even have an Amazon card is because I get five percent back on every purchase, but because I PIF every month, I never pay interest. Every time I pay my bill in full I giggle with glee just knowing that I actually cost Synchony a little bit of money. It's one of the highlights of my months.

Rich

 

[Caramon13]

@RJM62 I have to restrain myself from upgrading things constantly. It's just one big chain-reaction of events that starts with me spending $100 on a nice SSD and ends up with me gutting my computer and upgrading everything for 2K....

I think if you can make it work and you have nothing annoyingly slow then why bother? My laptop here at work was one of the first ones upgraded to an SSD. Patch days are a joke for me..I can patch and reboot and be back working before my co-workers computers even start applying the first update. They have their benefits

 

[denverpilot]

To me, because that discount seems pretty ubiquitous, the discounted price becomes the base price; and if I don't pay at least 30 percent less than the base price, I feel like I overpaid. It's just a duty of mine. One of my purposes in life is to exert downward pressure on prices. You might say it's a calling.

With Samsung anyway, it's pretty much everyone has the same prices... UNTIL... the next model comes out. (The huge price difference between the 840 Evo, 840 Pro, 850 Evo, and 850 Pro were all like that, as they were released.) So all you'll have to do is watch for an announcement that they've released something new (again, assuming they aren't kicking back on their heels after moving all the product lines over to V-NAND) and the previous one will be about 30% off. I started off buying them that way, but gave up when I needed to do the last two machines, and went with the newest Evo models at the time.

 

[flhrci]

@RJM62 I have to restrain myself from upgrading things constantly. It's just one big chain-reaction of events that starts with me spending $100 on a nice SSD and ends up with me gutting my computer and upgrading everything for 2K....

I used to do that many years ago as a hobby every couple years or so. Now I have had the same AMD Phenom 1090T Black edition and motherboard for I think 5 years now. Only upgrade has been the SSD. No reason to upgrade right now for what I do.

David

 

[Caramon13]

I used to do that many years ago as a hobby every couple years or so. Now I have had the same AMD Phenom 1090T Black edition and motherboard for I think 5 years now. Only upgrade has been the SSD. No reason to upgrade right now for what I do.

David

David, yep..my thoughts exactly. I haven't upgraded anything in about 2 years, unless you count the fact I added a NAS to the home network last year. Believe it or not we actually outgrew 500 GB of space....

 

[LDJones]

Rich, I installed a Samsung SSD in my nine year old desktop and it improved performance considerably. 4G of RAM is all I can cram in there but it does all I need it to do.

Yep...SSD and throw the swap files on it. Makes a big difference.

 

[RJM62]

As an aside, I really have to give MS their props for the memory management on Win10. This is a work machine and I only use about half a dozen programs on a regular basis, and Windows has them all stashed in RAM cache. It's using about 6 - 8GB of RAM when idle now, but everything I use regularly open up instantaneously, even if a couple of days have passed since I last used a program. They really got it right this time around.

Rich

 

[denverpilot]

As an aside, I really have to give MS their props for the memory management on Win10. This is a work machine and I only use about half a dozen programs on a regular basis, and Windows has them all stashed in RAM cache. It's using about 6 - 8GB of RAM when idle now, but everything I use regularly open up instantaneously, even if a couple of days have passed since I last used a program. They really got it right this time around.

They really did make some decent behind the scenes updates in both Win10 and Server 2012R2.

They screwed up how to share resources properly in Hyper-V though. They need RAM over-subscription capabilities in it. Works well, but numerous small VMs waste a lot of memory to perform correctly. They need to go after VMWare's model.