[filmscanners] Re: Building PCs ... the RAM.

["Charles Knox" <cknox@netspace.net.au>]

At 05:35 AM 15/01/2002 +0100, you wrote:
>Please, some good soul can explain to me ... why I should buy expensive DDR
>RAM in huge quantity (mass RAM is going to be 512MB or 1GB ... on my system
>very soon) ... when the bandwidth of MEMORY BUS is always the same e.g. on
>Asus A7V266 = 2.1GB/s ???
>This bandwidth is not saturated by any type of currently available memory
>and I strongly doubt the system is going to use all of it ... so why to pay
>the difference ?
>
>Just a matter of having a learning attitude .... :o) ...
>
>P.S.: please send answers OFF LIST ... not to bother the colleagues /
>friends.
>

The *system* isn't going to use all of it -- true.

Whether you need more than 128/256MB depends more upon what you're going to
do with it.

If using MS Office, browsing Web, playing most games, even video editing,
probably 256MB is enough, you'll see little or no improvement going to
512MB or more.

Use Photoshop and a film scanner (see, this isn't really OT, after all --)
), though, (50MB images and upwards -- I've had them up to 200-odd MB (just
to see what would happen...)) and its a different story; the more RAM your
system can handle the better.

Swapping big chunks to hard disk is slow, even on a RAID 0 system (about
40MB/s against ??GB/s in RAM, much less than that (down to 2 or 3MB/s) on a
single drive PIO system), so the more data can be held and swapped around
in RAM the quicker your job will get done.

Note many motherboards will play up/slow down under Win 9x with more than
512MB, even though claimed to handle gigabytes of the stuff (this is a
limitation of Windows.)

My Iwill KK266 Raid runs 768MB OK under Win98SE, but does slow down
noticeably -- under XP there's no detectable speed difference between 256
and 768.

If fitting 768MB or more, use NT 2000 or XP if you want top memory
performance.

Just my 2c worth...

Charles


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