RAM size matters, A LOT

[hckngrtfakt]

Large scale Bioinformatics are crazy on computation power. Don't you find it amazing we manage to package such colossal amount of data into almost all of our individual cells? Our cells and genes are the true super quantum computers.

I find it incredibly interesting, and I mean no disrespect to you, your research, your field of study, and neither your environment. I am simply talking at a more general level, one in which most end users would not need such high amounts of ram.
I too have ran computational simulations (one of which involved thermal trajectories for specific types of materials under alien atmospheres for JPL) but even after doing so, the hardware was so task-specific, each cluster only had about 10tb of ram in total. (about 64gb per rack)

 

[xkm1948]

I find it incredibly interesting, and I mean no disrespect to you, your research, your field of study, and neither your environment. I am simply talking at a more general level, one in which most end users would not need such high amounts of ram.
I too have ran computational simulations (one of which involved thermal trajectories for specific types of materials under alien atmospheres for JPL) but even after doing so, the hardware was so task-specific, each cluster only had about 10tb of ram in total. (about 64gb per rack)

wut disrespect? nah i don't give a rat ass about that all.

just trying to get some shit done on consumer grade stuff instead of shelling out several thousand for actual server grade stuff.

and yeah typical cluster node only has around 64GB of RAM.

 

[Komshija]

Surely it matters, but you have to include some common sense. I heard about some gamers (and personally know one) who have 32 GB or even 64 GB of RAM. For gaming, 32 GB RAM is overkill while 64 GB is beyond ridiculous.

Currently 8 GB RAM would be minimum for optimal performance, 16 GB is enough for pretty much everything - from hardcore gaming to some video and photo editing.

For professional video or photo editing, I would say 64 GB would be enough, 128 GB overkill and 256 GB beyond ridiculous. Unless you need to study nuclear fission, there's no need for 256 GB RAM. Heck, one of the most powerful corporations in my country has 512 GB RAM in their main server supercomputer.

 

[Ebo]

OP what rock do you live under ?
You have 128GB's of ram, thats fine by me, but you will never get close to using it, in my mind..........so its just all about bragging rights ?, good luck with that.

If you had a system that could use 128GB of ram(which it can), it means close to nothing even under heavy video editing, because you're never going to use it all even at 4K, and if it does matter, 64 is more effective in the end, so you ends up with bragging rights again ?. Ram is emptied every time the machine is rebooted, so all your ram is empty? why even bother if you dont sit a professinal machine, and if you do, you're not going to settle with and old I7-5820K.

 

[AhokZYashA]

512GB of RAM is quite the norm for SAP HANA database situations,
heck even some of applications uses up to 1.5TB of RAM,

for the sake of transactional database, but its for server environment.

 

[Ebo]

512GB of RAM is quite the norm for SAP HANA database situations,
heck even some of applications uses up to 1.5TB of RAM,

for the sake of transactional database, but its for server environment.

Sure, but look at his machine, its the same as mine, just exept the ram amount.

 

[P4-630]

Looks like I may have to look into 256/512GB RAM options in a year or two.

Time for a server I'd say.....

 

[FireFox]

And i have always thought that i am the only one who likes to buy more Ram than need it

 

[P4-630]

And i have always thought that i am the only one who likes to buy more Ram than need it

I'm still doing fine with 16GB for gaming then that is....

 

[FireFox]

I'm still doing fine with 16GB for gaming then that is....

I have 32GB and honestly i don't know why i bought that much.

 

[P4-630]

I have 32GB and honestly i don't know why i bought that much.

Just means you don't need to upgrade the coming years.

 

[FireFox]

Just means you don't need to upgrade the coming years.

It depends, i am waiting for Intel and their new CPU series and the next Boards, this time i skip the Z270 serie.

 

[xkm1948]

OP what rock do you live under ?
You have 128GB's of ram, thats fine by me, but you will never get close to using it, in my mind..........so its just all about bragging rights ?, good luck with that.

If you had a system that could use 128GB of ram(which it can), it means close to nothing even under heavy video editing, because you're never going to use it all even at 4K, and if it does matter, 64 is more effective in the end, so you ends up with bragging rights again ?. Ram is emptied every time the machine is rebooted, so all your ram is empty? why even bother if you dont sit a professinal machine, and if you do, you're not going to settle with and old I7-5820K.

Clearly someone was not reading carefully.

 

[Papahyooie]

My wife has a tablet that has 1GB of ram under W10. It works great for web browsing, and even those silly little mobile games.

 

[lyndonguitar]

I've been gaming in 8GB for years, and I upgraded to 16GB last year ~ nothing happened lol. but at least it feels good to have 16GB ram

I don't think I'll ever need 128GB ram though, price is way too much over what you gain for it. and I don't do server stuff

RAM size matters yeah. ALOT. but also CPU speed, GPU speed, HDD speed, etc.. all those matters alot. imagine gaming on 2Ghz pentium with 512MB ram. but for what you do, there's a 'recommended' spec until you get diminishing returns. For gaming and general use, that is 8-16GB.

 

[EarthDog]

Its clear this is only for his uses and the thread title has sensationalized everyone elses need (or complete lack thereof)

 

[hapkiman]

I have 32GB (4 x 8GB) of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000MHz, but only because my wife thought she would surprise me and buy a second 2 pack of 8GB sticks (the same ones that I had just bought when I made this build).

So of course it's overkill but she was just being nice and what the hell. Fill all slots right?

 

[xkm1948]

I have 32GB (4 x 8GB) of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000MHz, but only because my wife thought she would surprise me and buy a second 2 pack of 8GB sticks (the same ones that I had just bought when I made this build).

So of course it's overkill but she was just being nice and what the hell. Fill all slots right?

Yep! Gotta fill them up!

I remember buying RAM and SSD for my gf's laptop as presents. She was like WTH why are you wasting money on these things? I could totally use the money for new clothes/makeups/misc girl stuff.

 

[Ahhzz]

Surely it matters, but you have to include some common sense. I heard about some gamers (and personally know one) who have 32 GB or even 64 GB of RAM. For gaming, 32 GB RAM is overkill while 64 GB is beyond ridiculous.

Now you know two I run on 32, and frequently make a mess out of mine. I play BDO, which encourages all the time, AFK connection, which encourages my already latent tendency to not reboot the pc unless I have issues. I also tend to keep a couple dozen chrome windows open, reading articles, daily sales the Mrs. and I discuss, web comics, etc. When I'm not rebooting on a regular basis, it's nice to have that headroom of 32Gb.

To highlight the OP's point, "just trying to get some shit done on consumer grade stuff instead of shelling out several thousand for actual server grade stuff." He acknowledges that his needs are particular to his field, and would be better "served" in a server environment, but everyone here knows how much more service that would take from his wallet

 

[Toothless]

Now you know two I run on 32, and frequently make a mess out of mine. I play BDO, which encourages all the time, AFK connection, which encourages my already latent tendency to not reboot the pc unless I have issues. I also tend to keep a couple dozen chrome windows open, reading articles, daily sales the Mrs. and I discuss, web comics, etc. When I'm not rebooting on a regular basis, it's nice to have that headroom of 32Gb.

To highlight the OP's point, "just trying to get some shit done on consumer grade stuff instead of shelling out several thousand for actual server grade stuff." He acknowledges that his needs are particular to his field, and would be better "served" in a server environment, but everyone here knows how much more service that would take from his wallet

BDO is just another MMO with really bad coding, and everything you listed I could do on my laptop that has 8GB. But whenever you look all them ram slots it makes ye happy in ye happy places eh?

 

[Aquinus]

If I'm gaming, 16GB is more than enough and has been for the over 5 years of using my current machine. If I'm writing a service that will run on a server that has a data set larger than the amount of available memory, I will find a way to use it if performance is a problem. More memory is never a bad thing because unlike CPU power, it's one of those things that you don't really notice the benefit from until you run out of it. I can completely understand @xkm1948 wanting more memory. I used to work on a PostgreSQL database that was large enough where 128GB was enough to cache the most commonly hit tables but, not the entire database.

 

[xkm1948]

OK folks I am running into PageFile corruption problems again. Need your help and input here.

I am testing out a new program for work. Problem for this thing is it "automatically" detects and utilize max amount of RAM given the available threads. I have already run this on a workstation with 64GB of RAM and a 6 core 12 threads old Xeon. It ran out of RAM within 5 minutes and went right into swapping file mode. Since the workstation only has some RAID10 HDD, the processing speed was reduced to crawling.

Then I decided to try this out at home with my machine. same 6 core 12 threads configuration, except I am setting the PageFile on my HDD instead of SSD. The page file is set to "Let Windows Manage Size". So I started the program. The RAM utilization was fine all the way until it went pass 105GB. That's the point my system lost response. The task manager still show some updates all the way until 122GB and then blue screen. The error is IRQL NOT LESS EQUAL pagefile.sys

I am wondering what might be the cause of this? Not enough page file space? RAM instability? Mechanical problem with the HDD that hosts the pagefile? My system has been pretty stable so far, it has passed ASUS Realbench stress test for over 24hrs of looping. I am really scratching my head here.

 

[OneMoar]

the drive might not have enough throughput to expand the page file fast enough or keep up with the random read/write requests under high load the larger the file the slower the random read


likely are gonna need fast a SSD just to dedicate to the page file there is a server at work configured like that for this very reason

 

[Aquinus]

SSDs use ECC to ensure the correctness of data, hard drives (iirc,) don't do this, they only do a basic CRC check to see if what came over the wire is okay. What you're encountering is likely corruption on the disk itself, probably by running it full tilt. As @OneMoar said, you'll probably want an SSD because it's faster and protects your data with ECC. RAID 0+1 can protect your data long term but, it's not doing ECC or integrity checks for every read.

This is actually also why ECC memory exists because it only takes flipping one bit to make everything go to hell.

 

[xkm1948]

Increasing RAM size or Registered RAM is impossible. I might just invest in another larger SSD. Thanks for the heads up guys!! Really appreciate it!