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A few months back, Loyd Case answered the popular question, “Which Video Card Should I Buy?” Needless to say, his story caused a considerable lull in video card related questions from our readers, letting a new topic take the lead: RAM. How much do you need? How fast should it be? Are latencies important? Today, we’ll be covering everything you need to know to get the right RAM for your system.
Did I mention that this is going to be an all-encompassing guide on RAM? No? Well it is, so those of you who already know what RAM is for and how it works can skip ahead.
RAM stands for Random Access Memory and it stands as somewhat of a buffer between your hard drive and your CPU. There’s really nothing random about it; the CPU (generally) knows exactly what data it’s playing around with. When the CPU is processing data, it’s grabbing small bits in your systems memory, constantly jumping from place to place, reading, writing, and rewriting information. Hard drives work well when working with large blocks of data, but are extremely slow when jumping from sector to sector or switching from read to write. If your CPU had to process data directly on the hard drive, there would be a massive bottleneck.
So that’s why you need RAM. Having more RAM means you need to read from the excruciatingly slow hard drive less often, and faster RAM means your CPU can grab its bits faster. Of course, this still doesn’t answer how much RAM you need or in what circumstances faster RAM is actually useful.
There’s really no such thing as too much RAM, but there is such a thing as spending too much on RAM. What you do with your computer is what dictates whether or not more memory is actually practical. Below are some of the key stepping stones when it comes to how much memory a system needs.
IBM’s latest supercomputer Watson has 16TB of RAM. Overkill?
2GB – THE BARE MINIMUM
There is such a thing as not enough RAM, and anything below 2GB is bordering on just that. In fact, the 64-bit version of Windows 7 won’t even install on a system with less than 2GB of memory. Now, that’s not to say 2GB isn’t enough for anything. Your every day computing tasks, such as web browsing, editing documents, and even HD video, will be fine on such a system, so long as you’re not doing all of it at once.
G.Skill's balance of performance and value makes it a popular brand.
Running on just 2GB does have some limitations, though. Ever since Windows Vista, we’ve had a tool called SuperFetch which pre-loads your most used apps into memory so that they open faster when you need them. Windows likes to keep about half of your total memory free, using the rest as SuperFetch space. Small problem: with just 2GB of RAM and essential operating system resources taking up about a gig of memory to begin with, it doesn’t leave much space for SuperFetch to use.
Things will still run just fine, but additional RAM will give a large jump in performance, and at the current prices, stepping up to 4gigs is a pretty worthwhile investment. Apart from netbooks, you’d be hard pressed to find anything modern that comes with just 2gigs of memory anyway.
4GB – AN ALL-AROUND SWEET SPOT
When it comes to a balance of cost and performance, 4GB is just about perfect, at least for the time being. In every day computing, you probably won’t ever come close to filling it all up – well, unless you’re like me and have a nasty habit of leaving 116 tabs of Flash rich content open in Chrome.
Crucial is a very popular brand amongst hardcore gamers.
Even high-end gaming performs well with just 4GB of memory. Feel free to enjoy a casual bit of Photoshop and/or video editing, too. Apart from some very purpose specific computing, like extensive hi-res photo editing or industrial grade 3D modeling, 4gigs is the number to aim for.
8GB AND BEYOND
Stepping up to 8gigs can still be practical, especially when building a new system in which the additional investment would be fairly negligible. Any performance increases in going from 4 to 8GB won’t be particularly noticeable, but it does open up a few doors.
Unless you partake in very specific computing practices that can actually fill up the entire 8gigs, you can go ahead and disable your pagefile entirely. This will give you slight performance increases under certain circumstances, improve your system’s security, and put less strain on your hard drive.
Kingston has been in the game for years and has a wide selection.
From a gaming perspective, putting 8gigs of memory into a system is primarily a form of future proofing; however, in a professional environment, as a workstation running commercial grade software, 8GB may very well be necessary to keep things running smoothly.
3, 6, AND 12GB
You may have noticed the absence of any recommendations relating to 3, 6, and 12GB solutions. That’s because achieving 6GB of RAM, for example, requires an odd combination of DIMMs (memory sticks). In this example, you would need three 2GB DIMMs, meaning you would not be able to run them in a Dual Channel Configuration.
Dual Channel memory allows the CPU to access both DIMMs simultaneously, essentially turning the 64-bit memory bus into 128-bits. As far as gaming and your average computer use is concerned, dual channel and single channel configurations will perform almost identically, but any memory intensive operation, such as audio or video transcoding, will see significant improvements.
Corsair has always been one of our favorite memory brands.
In order to enable the dual channel memory bus, you need an even number of identical DIMMs, which is why 3, 6, and 12GB won’t work; however, unless you plan on doing a lot of memory I/O intensive work, the performance benefits of more RAM generally outweigh the benefits of the larger memory bus.
There is one exception – triple channel memory. In the case of the LGA1366 Core i7, memory can be configured into a triple channel bus using three identical DIMMs, meaning 6 and 12GB are much more practical.
Comments are closed on this article
Hamburger
August 30, 2011 at 4:00pm
Excellent article! Thank you very much! Helps out a lot to understand the latency and voltage information.
Guisano
August 30, 2011 at 3:29pm
The amount of RAM needed in your system can be determined by the equation X=2N, where N is your current amount of RAM.
Itterate as necessary
rayatwork05
August 30, 2011 at 3:00pm
it matters because the architecture (think data transfer route/methods) is optimized to be akin to the specified platform.
think about the algorithms of x86 and x64 processors from AMD and intel. both achieve the same end result, how they get there is different. if you have multiple hardware designed to be akin to the same architecture, there is a significant performance difference albeit not necessarily noticeable.
i speak with thousands of programmers around the US who specialize in "same platform" hardware optimization The architecture optimization in software is similar to that of hardware as they are both intertwined.
hope that helps!
bautrey
August 31, 2011 at 1:31am
What type of job do u have that lets u speak with thousands of programmers? I'm interested.
bautrey
August 30, 2011 at 2:04pm
Very nice article. But one more thing. Whenever a ram manufacturer says that RAM is best suited for a particular platform, is that just a marketing gimik or does it really matter? I bought the G. Skill Ripjaws X memory to put into an AMD system ignoring the fact that it said its best suited for an Intel i-series.
DU00
August 30, 2011 at 10:04pm
I would imagine that's all marketing. The RAM makers get their memory chips from other companies like Samsung and Micron so I don't see how platform would play into compatibility. Unless they can program the modules to benefit a certain platform. As long as clocks and timings are supported by the mobo I would imagine it's ok
james888
August 30, 2011 at 2:18pm
I would also like to know this. I stuck intel with intel but got my ram is "optimized" for lga 1366 not lga 1155
