Re: [langtitle=fr]Re: 4GB (3GB usable ) in windows 7 32 bit[/langtitle]
While that link is handy for the laymen, it's clearly missing the whole point by not testing the larger scale uses of the extra memory. It's all fine and well them say for single task scenarios etc, but with no comparisons it's a hollow example. They should have shown tests with video editing large HD files, Virtual machine use, running dedicated game serverw as well as the game in seperate tasks (something I do frequently), and the compression tasks were a bit thin, I mean seriously just 300 odd mb test! I frequently compress files way bigger, also why not any bluray conversions and native 64bit tasks like Photoshop cs5 doing large amounts of processing...
Most if not all of the tests they devised are only going to test the CPU and GPU ability to number crunch, not the actual real reason you would have more ram for, which is why the scores are virtually the same on every task regardless of the amount of ram. Extra ram is about the hidden performance gains doing things like Alt-Tabbing, multi-tasking workloads and background games etc smoothly, re-loading the game data over and over on respawns without need to spin up the hard drive each time, the sort of things you only notice once the ram is taken away or you use a machine that has far less, you all know how frustrating that is don't you when you are expecting it to run as good as your home rig does.
Also try running the windows checkdisk app, mine uses about 6gig of ram while scanning, clearly a large read ahead buffer of some sort to speed it up, compared to the command console version which is vastly slower and uses maybe 100mb of ram.
It's like they are trying to tell people they don't need something, which may be true to a point, but the price of the ram are quite cheap now so why not max your ram out if you can? It's similar to hard drives now that are stupidly cheap for 1tb & 2tb which is handy but not essential, always better to have too much than not enough I say, the whole less is more rubbish is just for apple fanboys in my view, in the space of a few years prices for hardware has dropped massively for the performance they offer, there has never been a better time to upgrade, ram is at an all time low price, hard drives are mega cheap, hell even entry level GPUs like the 5830/50 and 460 are very cheap for the grunt they offer. The younger generations need to remember that the early PCs were hideously expensive for calculater grade performance, I remember my first Pc in the early 1990s was a good £1200 for something now of the specs you'd use to make a gameboy advance worth £80