Memory Recommendation

[Scott Francis]

If you are running a 64bit system, 8 gigs or more will be helpful, if a 32bit system….you will gain nothing. Good luck!
Regards

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Mark Prebonich]

Thanks for the quick reply. I have a 64-bit system. I’ll look into Corsair which will probably be best for my X48 motherboard. I found 8GB for around $130 from Newegg.

-Mark

[Dave Haynie]

It’s entirely based on your use patterns.

So when your system is really loaded up, start the Windows task manager, go to the “Performance” page, and hit the “Resource Monitor” button. Now, got to the memory page of the Resource Monitor, and watch the three windows on the left.

You’re looking for the percentage of used memory in the top “Used Physical Memory” pane, how smooth the Commit Change pane is, and if you get many spikes on the Hard Faults/sec pane.

If you rarely see hard faults, in particular, you’re not doing much virtual memory, which means you’re not running out. You’ll always see some hard faults, simply because code is often loaded “virtually”.. the loader physically allocates part of a program, but simply marks the rest loaded, and lets the VM mechanism actually load the remaining code. But if you see lots of activity here, you could improve performance with additional memory, at least on a 64-bit OS.

And don’t panic too much about a fairly large amount of used physical memory. All modern OSs will try to allocate big chunks of memory for buffers and caches when they’re not otherwise occupied — unused memory is a waste. As applications need more physical memory, the OS will back off on its variable use of said resources. For example, I have 12GB on my system here, and just running regular stuff (web browsers, emailer, etc) I see 4GB used and 4GB “cached”… the OS has sucked up a whole 4GB in an effort to make the whole thing go faster.

Really, for video, I had 8GB for the least few years and didn’t think I needed any more. But I recently bought a new still camera, a Canon 60D (18Mpixel), and on a recent trip to Alaska, I shot a number of 10-30 photo panoramas. I print RAW out to 48-bit uncompressed TIFFs, and align them in Photoshop… oh, wow… 8GB isn’t all that much memory anymore! I never would have bet that still photo editing would have been the thing to push me over the top.

-Dave

[Mark Prebonich]

Thanks for the input. I did end up getting the 8GB Corsair memory. I suspect that this should help although I haven’t had a chance to do any tweaking/testing yet. For the price of DDR3 presently, this upgrade wasn’t all that bad. Now…for the next upgrade which will include the Core i7-3960X, that will cost a bit more.