8GB to 16GB ?

I ordered a new laptop (i7-2820QM, GTX 460M, 8GB, 120GB SSD...) and the ram is upgradable up to 16GB. I've been told it was overkill to get 16GB (+ it's more expensive to get it from the manufacturer). From most people I will never use more then 4 or 6GB in reel, so it would be overkill to add more.

But on the other hand some says to get it, the more is the better. If I add 8 more GB, will it be possible to profit from it ?

I mean admit I don't know much about computer and I have much to learn, so it may be 2 more stupid questions, but here they are :

Would it be possible that having 16GB will allows the computer to write/erase less on the SSD as it can hold much more on it's own ?

When I open my computer, I open everything at the same time, AIM, MSN, Email browser, Internet... would it be faster (less lag) with more RAM or it has nothing to do with it ?

Thanks

Eric

 

8GB is fine for what you (and 99% of laptop users) are doing and 16GB would be entirely superfluous, not to mention another $1000. If you would benefit from 16GB, you would already know it and not be asking it here.

 

The loading of programs after start up or the windows start up process itself will not benefit from the extra ram. It is limited by the speed of your hard disk or SSD.

You did not list any programs that use a lot of ram. Programs that do use a lot of ram are:
virtual machines
some games
editing of large pictures/graphics, videos, or 3d models
some applications that normally only run on servers.

I think you would benefit more by replacing your hard disk with a solid state disk (SSD).

 

More than 8GB of RAM will be useless. In fact, most people won't ever use more than 4GB of RAM. So getting 16GB will show absolutely no performance benefit for you whatsoever.

The only people who can really use 16GB of RAM are people running databases or Virtual Machines. I assume that you are not one of those people.

If you want your computer to "feel" faster when you open multiple applications at once, you want an SSD. Check out this video I made to show how much an SSD helps:
YouTube - Why I love my SSD - Windows 7 boot + loading 27 applications in about 1 minute.

 

Partially true, BUT SSD & 4GB is just perverted! I would much rather upgrade to 8GB first and then think about SSD, although I wouldn't buy one now anyways.
Not to mention that having insufficient amount of RAM (what IMO 4GB is) is bad for the SSD and leads to faster degradation.

To sum up - 4GB RAM is enough if your laptop experiences light usage only. And if this is the case - you don't need SSD either. If you though multitask on it and use it as a primary PC as I do - go for RAM until you reach 8GB and then consider SSD.

 

Ok thanks to all!

As stated in the first post I do have ordered my computer with a 120GB SSD (Intel SATA2).

Eric

 

What do you mean 4gb is for light use only? web browsing, watching movies, email, and ms office works without problems even with 2gb. That is not light use but average use. Maybe not for this forum but for the average laptop user that does not play games. With 4gb you can open as many word documents and browser tabs with flash videos as you want.

An SSD benefits almost all users because programs just load faster. Even if you are opening just Firefox it will load noticeably faster compared to a normal hard disk.

 

I found 2GB to be quite limiting for any sort of multitasking and I think 4GB is great for light use. But once you start opening up lots of web pages and programs, etc, 8GB becomes heavenly.

I think more RAM provides a greater benefit because you use the disk far less regardless if it is an SSD or not.

 

Well, all of the above would "work" without problems even with 3200RPM HDD, wouldn't they.... but we are not speaking about just "working" but about performance, efficiency, etc.

SSD + 4GB RAM is like putting a sports engine in a retro car that falls apart over 80 km/h anyway! Yes, of course it will accelerate faster, but does this investment make sense? No.

It's a madness and definitely bad for the SSD itself.

But this is not the thread to discuss this - it's been discussed many many times in other threads. this thread is about something else and the case is different.

Totally agree with the above with the small exception that 6GB might still be enough depending on usage. 8GB is just to secure that. But yes - 4GB is not enough for any advanced user or laptop used as a primary PC.

 

With 8GB RAM, almost 99% of what you would load is cached and SSD's benefit would be diminishing, assuming the above task.

 

That I do a lot, I often open 15 pages at the same time.

Eric

 

nope... because when you load something after start up it always comes from the hard disk.

 

Well this isn't entirely true either - before it goes to the RAM it needs to be read out of the HDD/SSD, doesn't it

But I don't know why we keep discussing this here - in a thread named "8GB to 16GB?" !

 

15 is nothing to be honest - I currently have 7 Firefox windows opened, each has 1-10 tabs! And I consider this light usage, normally I have more + IE window + other programs!

And I found out 4GB is too less. On the other hand 6GB is just right with some extra free memory remaining.

 

True, only the first time. I reboot once a month(windows update time) so that is like enjoying the benefit gain once a month for 1-2 seonds.

 

Of course having 8GB of RAM is better than having 4GB of RAM. But what I am saying is that it isn't worth the money.

If you actually look at your RAM usage, you most likely do not even come close to using 4GB of RAM unless you are running a database or a Virtual Machine. Opening 10 tabs in Chrome, all running Flash videos, uses about 100MB - 150MB of RAM for each tab. Running a single game uses at most 2GB of RAM, since games are all 32-bit. Windows 7 OS by itself uses 1GB of RAM.

Yes, you could invent some unrealistic scenario to intentionally use >4GB of RAM (e.g. opening 10,000,000 Chrome tabs, or running and minimizing 30 games at once). But in reality, people who use their laptops for web browsing, office productivity applications, and gaming will have a very hard time using 4GB of RAM on their machines.

I think you might be confusing two different issues here. When you talk about faster SSD degradation, I assume you are talking about the limited write cycles of NAND flash memory.

A lot of excess RAM in your system lets you use SuperFetch more, which is a caching algorithm used by Windows to pre-load the most commonly used applications into RAM for faster loading. This uses read operations. Wear on an SSD occurs when you perform write operations. And when you write a file, it gets written to disk. It does not matter whether you have 1GB of RAM or 1,000,000GB of RAM... that file gets written to disk.

Additionally, the whole issue of limited write cycles of NAND memory is over-hyped. Drive manufacturers engineered algorithms like wear leveling specifically to mitigate the limited write cycles of NAND memory. Because of that, you have drive manufacturers like Intel who will guarantee that their consumer-level drives based on MLC NAND memory will last 5 years after writing 20GB per day to it.

Unless you are running a database, you will not write 20GB per day to your drive. And even if you do write that much, you are probably like me and will replace your drive within 5 years because you want an upgrade in capacity or performance, or will replace a drive because it has died for reasons unrelated to write lifecycles of NAND memory.

To think about it another way: SSD's have been around for 2 years now. Have you ever heard of a SINGLE inistance, in real-life or through an internet post, where someone actually has an SSD that has used up all of its available write cycles, and will fail to write anymore data?

 

Claiming that more RAM is better than an SSD because it lets you use SuperFetch (Windows 7 pre-loading caching algorithm) also means: You have so much excess unused RAM that you aren't using, that Windows 7 can afford to use some of that RAM for SuperFetch.

So by saying that you should get more RAM so that SuperFetch can be more effective, aren't you also effectively telling people to buy more RAM than they need?








When people look at SSD's, they will often look at sequential read speeds (because they are the "big" numbers, and are only 2x - 4x faster than HDD sequential reads) or load times for a single application (0.5sec vs. 0.3sec). When they do that, they are unimpressed by SSD vs 7200rpm HDD - and rightfully so.

What makes an SSD so much faster than a HDD is random read speeds, random write speeds, and I/O's per second (IOPS). In these areas, an SSD is literally two full orders of magnitude faster (100x faster) than a mechanical HDD. And most of what you do with your computer (boot, loading applications, running games, installing applications, etc) uses random read/write patterns, not sequential patterns. It is literally like going from a 56K dial-up modem to a 5.6Mbps broadband connection that is 10,000% faster.

Look at the numbers of a mechanical HDD vs. SSD:
- Random 4KB read speeds go from 0.7MBps --> ~50+ MBps
- Random 4KB write speeds go from 0.3MBps --> ~40+ MBps
- IOPS goes from 600 IOPS --> 40,000 IOPS




SuperFetch is great, but it only works well in certain situations. SuperFetch only works for read operations that are cached in memory. It does not work for write operations. It does not work for read operations that aren't in SuperFetch. It does not come into effect for anything that actually hits the HDD at all. SSD's are ALWAYS fast, and will ALWAYS yield better multitasking performance and general overall "smoothness" to your computing experience, regardless of the situation.

Check out this video of an extreme example of SSD mutitasking performance. I boot Windows 7 + load 27 applications at startup in about 1 minute.
YouTube - Why I love my SSD - Windows 7 boot + loading 27 applications in about 1 minute.

A real-world scenario where this multi-tasking performance would actually be beneficial:

- You are installing an application (random write operations - SuperFetch does not help), and are browsing the web while you wait (random read/write operations for cached files - SuperFetch does not help). If the installer is hitting a 7200rpm HDD hard enough, it will easily max out its ~600IOPS. Something as simple as browsing the web will feel slower / laggier as the web browser hits the browser cache on the HDD with multiple small-file read/write operations.

SuperFetch is all fine and good. But if you're advocating buying a bunch of excess RAM for the purposes of turning that RAM into a giant cache, you're better off just configuring that memory into a RAM disk. If you're looking for performance and have $200 to spend on 16GB vs SSD, then you'd be MUCH better off buying the SSD.

 

Your idea that not enough RAM will damage an SSD is speculation that has never been proven one way or the other so you should probably stop posting it.

4GB of RAM is the most 99.9% of people will need right now. Even gamers can get by just fine with 4GB of RAM as long as they don't have a lot of programs or intensive tasks open in the background. Close excess programs before gaming + close your internet browser and 4GB of RAM will be overkill for any gamer.

 

Ram is great but does not improve I/O to the storage medium. I noticed with the P7805 a vast improvement surfing the web. This of course along with a vast improvement to all applications in opening and closing etc. Besides being faster the SSD has much higher IOPS.............

 

Actually, Microsoft itself says the complete opposite: Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

A pagefile is a wonderful thing to put on an SSD because it's very few writes and mostly reads.

 

4 years ago, with Vista x64 I found out in a very short time that 8GB was the 'new' 4GB for 64bit systems. That doesn't mean that 8GB is 'sufficient' or 'overkill' though in 2011.

I too will evaluate a computer similar to what you have ordered as soon as I can. But I have no doubt that with SB, 16GB RAM will be the new 64bit 'baseline' for me too; going forward in 2011.

Not only is the SB CPU's capable of utilizing that much RAM (I don't mean simply supporting that much ram, I mean having the muscle to actually throw around that much data/apps in ram with ease...), but programs are continuously getting bigger and more feature rich all the time. Not to mention that we are constantly using more and more apps too (and usually all at the same time).

I don't know your intended usage model, but if you want to enjoy the full power of your notebook over most/all of its lifetime (while you own it), then I can wholeheartedly agree that upgrading your RAM as soon as you (economically) can will be something you won't regret too much.

Especially if you have a notebook with 4 RAM slots - adding 2x4GB sticks is at an expecially sweet price point right now.


Keep in mind that it is not only what you're using the computer for that will determine if more RAM is warranted or not; Windows 7 x64 can effectively use all the RAM you can reasonably throw at it - and it will be a smoother, faster and more stable O/S because of it.

When I boot up my 8GB systems, they're using between 1.5GB to 2.4GB just sitting there idle, doing nothing. If I could put more RAM in them, I'm sure that the idle RAM usage will be higher - but then so will the performance of the system be too (not to mention the additional boost any 64 bit apps will get with the extra RAM available).


If you bought the new notebook for anything work related, the additional RAM will pay for itself over the lifetime of the system easily. Of that I have no doubt.

f you are simply using this system for personal use/gaming - then you at least need to try it with 16GB RAM (for at least a week for Windows to 'adapt' itself to the new hardware) to see if it really gives you any improvements for your use.


Would love to hear your impressions on this system when you get it.

Good luck.

 

Exactly. 4GB and SSD is fine. Take it from all the SSD owners that haven't had any problems. In fact, my SSDs are right on schedule as far as lifespan.

Gracy, if you're going to spout wise, please back that up. Otherwise it amounts to nothing more than disinformation.

 

Exactly.

The whole issue of limited write cycles for an SSD is over-hyped.

Excess RAM used by SuperFetch will only be useful for read operations. It does not help one bit with write operations, and will not in any way help extend the life of an SSD.

As long as a user has enough RAM for their needs that they never page to disk, they would be better off buying an SSD rather than buying even more RAM.

 

The simple test is to actually track your physical memory usage during a period of high computer activity. If you have the money then by all means, buy more RAM than you really need. But saying things like 16gb is the new 8gb is rather silly. The way Windows 7 manages virtual memory is quite complex, making it possibly to make use of more memory than you have physically available at any one time.

The first thing to ask is: Have I encountered any situation where my memory usage is so much greater than the amount of physical memory I have available, that it is noticeably slowing me down?

I wish more people would understand that Windows 7 will always page to disk, whether or not you have a pagefile. If you don't have a pagefile, it just won't page out to pagefile.sys. Thats it.

 

4GB is plenty for the average user, even on 64bit. Modern gaming, I'd go to 6 or 8GB. 16GB is silly unless you run many virtual machines or do heavy video editing or something along those lines. I run a massive java server with it's massive interface application, virtual machines, and Firefox with 100+ tabs, Thunderbird, various chat and other apps and a virus scanner all at the same time on an 8GB machine and I still have 1-2GB free. And another 1GB+ in cached files that's available to apps if they want it.

Make sure when you're looking at the amount of memory you have available that you aren't looking at the "free" memory, but you're adding together "cached" and the "free" memory because that's what's truly available.

Do you have a source for that? Because it doesn't really pass my sniff test.

 

My RAM usage as reported by the task manager rarely ever even went close to 4GB, yet when I went to 8GB, it was a night and day difference. I was planning on getting an SSD, but now I feel it would be a complete waste of money. Also I might only be using 2.44GB right now with about a dozen windows open in firefox, a game running, and a video playing, but the rest of the RAM is being used. All but 19MB of the remaining 5.7GB are storing cached data.

 

Yeah, 16GB RAM is not silliness (and btw, I said for 'me' anyway).

Trottel gets it.

Windows doesn't tell you what it's 'really' using, or, more appropriately, what it wants/needs to be using. Nor does it give you an easy way to estimate what your benefits will be with more RAM. As I mentioned, the best thing is to simply try it for a week.

The important point though is that Windows will reconfigure itself depending on how much RAM is installed - that is the variable that we can't guess at for each of our specific situations.

All I know is that 4 years ago, getting a 16GB capable system was simply stupid ($6K+ desktop) compared to the $2K the 8GB systems cost.

Today, having 16GB RAM for about $100 (for a four slot notebook) is a no brainer to me - especially for a SB based notebook.

If my old systems lasted me 3+ years and allowed me the luxury to wait for the 'perfect' time to upgrade ('perfect in terms of spending the least amount of money to get the best increase in performance while still being productive with my current setup), then these SB notebooks with the RAM maxed out to 16GB or even 32GB should easily last me 5 years or more - the choice will be mine.

One point of about pagefile usage: just because Windows will 'always' page to disk, doesn't mean that it is not desirable to do so (even with 8GB+ systems).

 

Thanks for your input!

I can give a review, but clearly it is a huge step from what I use now. Only the SSD (my first) will make such a difference from I'm use to!

Eric

 

Windows is always trying to maintain a backing store which means that everything it has in RAM it ideally wants a copy of on a permanent storage disk so that if necessary, it can release 100% of RAM instantly and not lose anything. The classic scenario where this happens is during a crash dump. Your computer crashes and you want the entire contents of memory on disk so you can tell what caused the error. You need this to happen before your computer loses power/restarts because RAM is volatile (cannot retain data when not powered). So what Windows does is write everything that isn't backed on disk to pagefile.sys. Your computer restarts and then Windows writes out the .dmp files.

Paging occurs whenever you fetch programme code from executables or dynamic link libraries. You can use a tool like latmon to track page faults from running processes and drivers and it will tell you the process name, when the page fault occurs, how many faults occur and how long it takes to resolve them. You will always get page faults because its an important mechanism in virtual memory management. It doesn't matter if you have disabled pagefile.sys. To see for yourself, disable your pagefile, download Latmon and fire it up, then just let your computer idle. Watch the page faults roll in. And this is just when your computer is idling.

There is some part of memory space that can't be paged out however - kernel stuff that handles page fault generation and so on.

The kind of stuff that goes into and out of the pagefile is stuff that doesn't have a copy on disk. So for example, when you fire up Photoshop, all the programme code, the GUI assets, everything is installed on your hard drive and is fetched straight from the disk. This type of thing has nothing to do with pagefile.sys.

The kind of stuff that can get put into pagefile.sys are things like undo buffers, unsaved work etc. stuff which is in memory but doesn't have a copy on disk. If you don't have a pagefile, then this data must always be in RAM because if it isn't then you will lose your work, or lose your undo levels or whatever. As such, having no pagefile can negatively impact on Windows' ability to clear RAM quickly for other things. If you have so much RAM that it doesn't matter then fair enough but thats a very brute force approach. If you don't have more RAM than you need, then not having a pagefile inhibits Windows' ability to release RAM for other things. In some cases this can cause more disk trashing, because big chunks of RAM cannot be released to a program that wants it and it has to swap the whole thing in from disk. (Swapping is not the same as paging).

What windows won't do is waste disk space when it doesn't need to. So for example, if all the code/assets required to run photoshop are installed on disk and then you need to free up alot of RAM (i.e. you are massively multitasking), what Windows won't do is write out that code to pagefile. It doesn't need to because a copy of that code already exists on disk and theres no point in having 2x copies.

Heres a very good explanation of how paging works in Windows 7.

 

Yes. that was what I meant because 2x4GB DDR3 is cheaper than a decent size SSD(during boxing day it was 80 bucks or so comparing with 150+ for a 128GB SSD) and that was in the context of the mentioned usage.

Without a proper context, there is no point of arguing which is better. For example, I would not use Intel SSD if I am doing heavy video editing but would take my chance and try Sandforce even though I would not touch Sandforce for any other situation.

 

We all know how paging works in modern OS.

What we cannot come to agreement is the claim 'Microsoft would only use the page file when it is needed'. It is much better in Vista+ than in XP.

The operative word here is 'needed'. I have tested and to me, it still causes excessive disk activity that is not needed. It is particular obvious on my slow machine. The disk temperature increased which caused the fan to spin harder and I saw the green spinner slightly longer for many of the tasks I do.

On my machine equipped with SSD, I don't care that slightly increased activity.

 

No its really simple:

Data in RAM. Is there a physical copy on storage disk?

Yes? No need to write to pagefile. Already exists on disk.

No? Write to pagefile. Page it back in when called for or when enough RAM has been released for it. What Windows won't do is save copies of the same thing all over your storage disk for the hell of it.

You can't say that disk activity = pagefile activity. That is not correct. Windows could be fetching code from an executable, .dll, .sys whatever. The backing store is more than just pagefile.sys. This is what alot of people don't seem to understand.

 

Unfortunately(well fortunately for them), my friends at Microsoft have long retired so I can no longer know the code level detail(they used to ask me if I want the full NT source) of how they implement it nowadays.

What you mentioned is how you would code it, not how Microsoft has coded it.

I have tested and retested multiple times that when I disabled page file, my slowest machine which never exceed the RAM limit feel faster in everything I do comparing with having the page file enabled(which is not needed from a RAM perspective because over half of my RAM is still being used as cache).

EDIT:
how many times I have to say that we all know how paging works ? I was specifically saying that when I enabled page file, I see increased disk activities doing the same tasks.

 

I really can't make myself any clearer on this issue but I will say that I am not talking about gut feelings. I'm talking about how paging works. Whether you want to believe how it actually works or your own intuition is entirely up to you. However, I would like to point out that human intuition is incredibly unreliable and incredibly easy to lead.

For example, if you take 2x identical sounds where 1 of them is 3dB louder than the other and ask someone to pick which one sounds 'better', they will almost always pick the louder one. Classic trick, and it fools so many people. I know how the trick works and I still fall for it by doing things like setting a compressor where the input is below threshold. I'll swear blind it sounds better compressed. Until I realize its actually doing nothing and I've been fooled by my total and incorrect belief that it is in fact doing something.

When you disable pagefile and convince yourself that your computer is only ever using RAM and never paging from storage disk, then yeah. Its easy to believe that your computer is faster. Except if you run Latmon you'll find that you are getting thousands of pagefaults when idling because your computer is always paging, whether or not you have a pagefile. Don't just believe me. Run a process monitor that tracks pagefaults and prepare to be WOWed.

 

I would stop here. If you keep on talking things under the perception that I know less than you, there is no point continuing.

 

You said that, not me.

You also said:

I said:

I mean you can't make it any simpler than that. Beyond that, its so hard to tell what people have running and what they don't which can impact on the way the system performs. For instance, do you have the SuperFetch service enabled? So many people have disabled SuperFetch or pagefile.sys or both for one reason or another.

Over in the SSD megathread, these were old suggested tweaks from the JMicron 602 era that have maintained some level of permanence long after they became unnecessary. JMicron 602 was the SSD controller that used to choke on heavy disk i/o.

 

Agreed here. I've run one of my laptops with 2GB RAM and I in most cases run out of RAM. I've have disabled Aero and stuff like that.. A second tab with YouTube makes my laptop laggy as ....! And sometimes when I watch a movie or something like that the whole ting starts suttring. I'm running this on my FULL-HD TV.