[quote name='Sirisian' timestamp='1313511065' post='4849897']
[quote name='Lode' timestamp='1313494036' post='4849801']
That means I need to dive into the world of current hardware again, but some websites are just too chaotic or require you to have followed the hardware trends for the last years.

If you're building one yourself then go with the i7-2600k and a compatable motherboard then plop in a 580 GTX and 16 GB of ram (newegg has deals). The nice thing about the i7-2600k is you can just overclock it to 4Ghz without much hardware knowledge and it won't overheat or anything. That would give you another 5 year computer. Hardware has gotten simple recently.
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Don't bother with 16 gigs unless you actually have a need for it.

I paid extra to stuff my board with 16 to run a single project in a timely manner. (Nature of the problem's data set meant needing to work across about 14GB or so of data at a time, and paging it off the drive could have taken a month or more.)

However, I have yet to use more than 1/4 of than on average. Get 8 GB of ram at max, and put the rest toward a SSD for your OS drive.
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With 2 - 4 GB package deals on New Egg for just $60 why the hell not? I plan on buying a new PC by christmas and it's going to have a 2 GB vidya card, 16 gig ram and either a pehnom x2 6 core or the bulldozer. Beasty.

Don't bother with 16 gigs unless you actually have a need for it.

I don't tend to upgrade computers so when buying a computer that will last for 5 years then 16 GBs seems decent. I mean my laptop has 16 GB and 2 GBs on the videocard and I bought that back in march. 8 GB was what people were recommending years ago. Not to mention having paging off and turning off all HD usage (Firefox has a setting to not touch the HD by the way) goes a long way. I idle at 3-4 GBs at boot since Windows 7 pre-loads everything you might ever use. In the end it makes the whole thing snappy. Also you can do stuff like this.

Not sure where we'll be in 5 years though when it comes to RAM. Either we'll be using 16 GB of DDR5 or it will get cheaper and continue to shrink and we'll be sitting on "unlimited RAM" for all practical purposes with like 64 GB sticks for dirt cheap.

With 2 - 4 GB package deals on New Egg for just $60 why the hell not? I plan on buying a new PC by christmas and it's going to have a 2 GB vidya card, 16 gig ram and either a pehnom x2 6 core or the bulldozer. Beasty.

Buy one 2x4GB for $60 now, plus a game or two. In a few months/years when you find yourself actually using more than the 8GB, then buy more. Maybe you'll find it on sale for even less at that point, or be upgrading to a completely new system with the next gen of ram.

It makes zero sense to buy computer hardware that you're not going to actually use, because you'll just pay more for no good reason.


If you expect to use it, then yes, of course, spend the money now and make use of it. But if they don't plan to make use of it, then it is as useful as suggesting to someone that they need to buy a set of spare knobby off road tires for their new truck when all they want it for is moving stuff around in a city. Pointless and a waste of money for something they're not going to use at that time.

Why buy something that is as easy to update as RAM now, just 'so you have it' in the future?

Why buy something that is as easy to update as RAM now, just 'so you have it' in the future?

People find a peculiar satisfaction in owning nice things, even if those things have little or no practical value. Like the guy who spends $3000 instead of $750 on a DSLR, when all he uses it for is taking out-of-focus pictures of his kids' school plays. It's silly, but I think it's human nature, and $60 of extra RAM isn't worth fighting over :-)

Personally, I'm in the "max out your RAM" camp -- all of my machines at work and home have 8gb -- my home machines are maxed except for my MacBook -- I'm torn on the upgrade of that one since I'd *really* like for Apple to come up with a compelling upgrade for me first (why does your 'consumer' 13" have higher resolution than your 'pro' 13"? And why no discrete GPU?... but I digress).

Anyhow, ram is stupidly cheap right now at under $10/gb for anything but insane stick densities. I'll be looking for a motherboard that supports at least 32gb, and I'll be maxing out at least half the available slots, if not all of them. Its great to be able to disable the page file. Its also great to be able to run a VM or two without skimping on their RAM or robbing all of the host's resources.

Windows 7, if that's your cup of tea, is also pretty darn good about using all of the available ram to pre-load common apps so that they launch quickly, so even if you don't always need to work on an 8gb+ data set, its still being used to give you a better overall experience.

because all the powerful AMD cards have been snapped up by bitcoin miners

Wow, seriously? Bitcoin has an actual effect on the hardware market?

So that's what all this computational power is used for, rather than for science, or, of course, games?

Buy one 2x4GB for $60 now, plus a game or two. In a few months/years when you find yourself actually using more than the 8GB, then buy more. Maybe you'll find it on sale for even less at that point, or be upgrading to a completely new system with the next gen of ram.

It makes zero sense to buy computer hardware that you're not going to actually use, because you'll just pay more for no good reason.


If you expect to use it, then yes, of course, spend the money now and make use of it. But if they don't plan to make use of it, then it is as useful as suggesting to someone that they need to buy a set of spare knobby off road tires for their new truck when all they want it for is moving stuff around in a city. Pointless and a waste of money for something they're not going to use at that time.

Why buy something that is as easy to update as RAM now, just 'so you have it' in the future?

Well, I do plan on doing 3D modeling and testing out some phsyics sims on it as well. But, still, will ALL 16 GB be used? Probably not...

Though, the fact I could ray trace a scene, run a sim and play a brand new game on max settings with at least 40 FPS is pretty sexy.

Wow, seriously? Bitcoin has an actual effect on the hardware market?

So that's what all this computational power is used for, rather than for science, or, of course, games?

Oh heck yeah. Graphics cards are cheaper than multi-cpu boards that support multi-core cpus. With the projects that turn GPUs into massively parallel processors just set up a three way sli/xfire and you've got a bitcoin churnin machine.

Oh heck yeah. Graphics cards are cheaper than multi-cpu boards that support multi-core cpus. With the projects that turn GPUs into massively parallel processors just set up a three way sli/xfire and you've got a bitcoin churnin machine.

How much does it earn per hour?

It makes zero sense to buy computer hardware that you're not going to actually use, because you'll just pay more for no good reason.[/quote]

Unless you are SC2 pro-gamer, you won't be using full GPU 95% of the time. There is also next to no software which is multi-threaded to any meaningful degree, so 2 cores will do.

8GB is good, 16GB is better, 24GB is nice.

The advantage of plenty of RAM is that you never hit swap file. And if there's still too much, make 4GB ramdrive, put /tmp or \temp on it. Or run CI on it.

Or run 5 VMs, each with 2GB of RAM. Or something.

Considering the prices, RAM is one of cheaper ways to scale. Especially since anyone doing any kind of creative work never has "will not use more than". It also saves you from that annoying swap trashing when trying to process 100 RAW photos or similar.

It makes zero sense to buy computer hardware that you're not going to actually use, because you'll just pay more for no good reason.

Unless you are SC2 pro-gamer, you won't be using full GPU 95% of the time. There is also next to no software which is multi-threaded to any meaningful degree, so 2 cores will do.

8GB is good, 16GB is better, 24GB is nice.

The advantage of plenty of RAM is that you never hit swap file. And if there's still too much, make 4GB ramdrive, put /tmp or \temp on it. Or run CI on it.

Or run 5 VMs, each with 2GB of RAM. Or something.

Considering the prices, RAM is one of cheaper ways to scale. Especially since anyone doing any kind of creative work never has "will not use more than". It also saves you from that annoying swap trashing when trying to process 100 RAW photos or similar.
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Did you actually read what was written, and think about what it says?


If you are actually using all that ram, then guess what,... You are using it, and therefore it makes perfect sense to have it.

If you never find yourself pushing more than 2-6 GB of ram, then running 16+ is a waste of money that could have been spent on something more valuable to you. Such as putting a little more of the budget toward a SSD that will make performance that much better.

If you usually find yourself only pushing 2-6 GB of ram, but know that you may sometimes be using more, then you have to make a judgement call on whether you want to put that little extra in for those few times you need it, or just suffer through the handful of slow times. There is nothing wrong with having lots of ram you rarely use, just think before you build a system.