How much Performance increase upgrade from 4gb DDr3 to 8GbDDR3?

I have 4GB DDR3 1333MHz in my Alienware M17x-R2 right now and am thinking about purchasing 8GB DDR3 1333MHz from here for like $360.00 and just need to know if its worth it. Will I really see a huge performance increase going from 4gb to 8gb? I dont even think I use all the 4gb i have. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

probably not much.

I'd do an SSD.

 

i would do a SSD, but they dont offer enough space yet. I need my 1tb from my RAID0.

 

So, not worth the RAM upgrade then?

 

for gaming, no its not worth it. if you do alot of video encoding and stuff like that then yes.

 

Would it increase my boot times at all? and shut down times?

 

More RAM does not = better performance unless you are actually using 100% of the currently installed 4GB's. Then you begin to use the hard drive for swap space and that will lead to a performance decrease.

So, technically, more RAM will not speed up your system unless you use it. All of it.

I would go with an SSD as well unless you are a big photochopper, video creation and editing, etc

 

Not at all.

 

I want 2 500gb SSD if anyone knows of any.

 

Newegg has a 256GB SSD for sale right now ($550 US?), put your important programs, OS, games on that, then use one of your old 500GB to store other files. This will still be significantly faster for loading, readning and booting up and safer than your RAID 0 setup now, and you'll have almost a TB.

 

I didn't even notice a change from 2 to 3 gigs of ddr2 ram when gaming, so I second that you should go for a ssd.

 

+1 on that strategy.

Don't know the drive on NewEgg but having the SSD for OS and apps and spinning rust for data storage is a good one.

That's what I'm doing now (128GB SSD + 500GB 7200K)...

Note that you still need to optimize the SSD as it will definitely slow down over time due to fragmentation-type effects.

 

That's what trim is for

 

Not sure if this is what you are implying, but DO NOT defrag an SSD drive! Fragmentation has no effect on SSDs and you can shorten your drive life by defragging.

 

You going to run Raid or something on those SSD Drives, lol

 

@darkloki
It's a cool setup. I've done some SSD RAID10 arrays that are instantaneous. Xiotech and Pillar are nice gear. I think the price-performance levels for a single-user aren't there yet. SSD + rust is still best bang for the buck right now for most people....

@EntityX
TRIM helps but it's not perfect or complete.

@CFrolander
The shortening life argument is way overblown and it's obsolete (like the memory effect in NiCad batteries) - a very specific situation (first-gen MLC was 10K cycles) that is overblown to a generalized one and attains urban legend status. 100,000 cycles (and remember, that's per memory cell) is the minimum MLC now and SLCs are better (typically 1-5 million cycle lifespans now). On the SANs I spec and deploy, SSDs have a 30-50 year expected lifespan from a "finite number of write cycles" standpoint. Sure, those SSDs are rated for longer life but we're talking transactional databases getting hundreds of transactions per second.

Just how long do you plan on keeping the drive? Do you keep keep regular HDs that long? However long you think it's going to be be, you're going to sell the SDD on eBay and upgrade to a bigger drive WAY before that....

I could talk (type for hours about this. Anyways, at the consumer level, it's not even a consideration if you're buying namebrand gear. Pay more attention to the controller and write speeds.

As for fragmentation itself. It absolutely has an effect on SSD drives. For example, my 1730 is running XP (so, no TRIM) and I benchmarked the SSD when new and every couple weeks. The disk channel was definitely slower - it's more than just the removal of rotational latency and mechanical positioning. After a couple months, I MyDefragged it and its speed came back to almost new - plus the 5-10 second random pauses went away (most likely Windows doing NTFS houselcleaning (gather and collect stuff) and my annoyance with it is the reason I ended the testing). I have the numbers around here somewhere but can't find them right now.

Here's the MyDefrag FAQ on SSDs. It's a good overview without all the boring engineering details as to why it doesn't matter (google and wikipedia will find those easily enough). There are a few free tools I recc. to my clients. This is one of them.
http://www.mydefrag.com/FAQGeneralI...gReduceTheLifespanOfMyFlashSSDMemoryDisk.html

 

My Intel X25 G2 has the Intel SSD Management Tool which you run once per week & keeps the SSD in good order (works in XP too).

 

FYI, when using SSDs, there is no TRIM support in RAID. Also you'll want to disable anthing that writes unneccessarily to the SSD. Things such as restore points, refrain from using hibernate as it writes what sin the system memory to the SSD as well. You'll also want to NEVER DEFRAG an SSD. They don't need it like a platter drive does. This can quickly deteriorate SSD performance. it will deteriorate becase SSDs have limitations. They can write to 4K pages, but can only delete information in 64K blocks. Thats where TRIM comes in useful in preventing speed degradation. SSDs slow down when all the blocks have been written to. Then in order to write to a block, the SSD must copy what information is on the block that is not marked as deleted, move it to another available sector, write it there, go back delete the old block, and write the new information. This is the cause for the slow down. The only way to bring it back to factory speeds with out TRIM is to "00" fill the SSD. Essentially writing 00 to ever page so that the SSD only needs to go back and write "1" where it's needed in order to save the new information. The purpose behind TRIM is to consolidate the information in the background so that it maximizes the available pages to prevent degradation. Note that Vista does not support TRIM natively. Only Windows 7 does. Other operating systems may require a "garbage collection" program like intel uses just as psikey stated.

If you want to know more about TRIM or the page/block issue, there are many good threads and articles that can be found on google. They can probably explain it better then I can.

SSDs are we're you will see the greatest performance benefit. RAM will net almost zero benefit unless you do serious multitasking or use large CAD or photoshop type documents.

 

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jared_good

check link

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-010-KS&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1427

 

Not quite as good performance as the Torqx M28 Solid State Drives so im assuming im paying $1000 for the 512gb storage? Is there a United States site I can buy from? And ya 2 of those in RAID0

 

restore points? ha! try "registry". windows writes to the bloody registry all the freakin' time.

Trim really only handles delete sub-block allocation fragmentation. Filesystem fragmentation is an issue for the OS, no matter what the disk storage medium is.

And we're skipping the whole "is an ssd really the best choice for my system" discussion. they're not always best but that's covered better in other places, i'm sure. but generally, yeah, SSDs are the shizzle. And OWC's Mercury Extreme RAID-ready Enterprise-class drives are the super-shizzle...

 

even the crapiest ssd's...will out perform hard disk drives...

As the technology is on the new side compared to HDD, i unfortunately must refrain from purchasing one of these because of the limitations on capacity...and the INSANE price for 256gb models with trim and 220mb+ read/write speeds .. i'd say it'll be another year be4 i pick one up .. hopefully by then theyll have cheap 500gb models...hehe