I am now overclocking my 3.0 cpu by 10%.
(I edit photos and videos.)
I will probably stay with my current MB another couple years.
I am using 2GB of Mushkin memory.
I am considering going to 4GB. I have several questions:
If I go to 4GB will I see much of an increase in throughput?
(I will have to discard my 4 sticks of 512mb.)
Given the expense will the tradeoff be worth it?
Will my MB utilize all 4GB? (I have read it will actually only use 3GB.)
Can I use 'off the shelf' less expensive memory?
What brands and types should I consider?
jime wrote:
> I am now overclocking my 3.0 cpu by 10%.
> (I edit photos and videos.)
> I will probably stay with my current MB another couple years.
> I am using 2GB of Mushkin memory.
> I am considering going to 4GB. I have several questions:
>
> If I go to 4GB will I see much of an increase in throughput?
> (I will have to discard my 4 sticks of 512mb.)
> Given the expense will the tradeoff be worth it?
> Will my MB utilize all 4GB? (I have read it will actually only use 3GB.)
>
You could replace two of the 512MB sticks with 1 GB sticks and see if
that makes any difference. This will take the computer up to 3 GB,
hopefully without any changes in memory performance.
> Can I use 'off the shelf' less expensive memory?
> What brands and types should I consider?
>
> Your advice will be appreciated.
> Thanks.
> Jim
>
>
>
jime wrote:
> I am now overclocking my 3.0 cpu by 10%.
> (I edit photos and videos.)
> I will probably stay with my current MB another couple years.
> I am using 2GB of Mushkin memory.
> I am considering going to 4GB. I have several questions:
>
> If I go to 4GB will I see much of an increase in throughput?
> (I will have to discard my 4 sticks of 512mb.)
> Given the expense will the tradeoff be worth it?
> Will my MB utilize all 4GB? (I have read it will actually only use 3GB.)
>
> Can I use 'off the shelf' less expensive memory?
> What brands and types should I consider?
>
> Your advice will be appreciated.
> Thanks.
> Jim
Using Task Manager, you could monitor how much memory is
being used by Photoshop.
A rule of thumb from years ago, was that if Photoshop had
undo depth set to 1, you needed five times as much memory
as the size of the current image you were working on. So
if you frequently work on 300MB images, multiply by 5 to
get 1.5GB. If Photoshop had 1.5GB available, it would not
have to use the scratch disk. If you allowed another
300MB for the OS and its caches, that would bring you
up to 1.8GB.
Buying more memory, would appear to allow the processing
of a larger image, without going to the scratch disk.
And that is where the "throughput" comes from. Photoshop
doesn't go any faster, but it doesn't have to temporarily
store as much stuff on the scratch. Avoiding the scratch
disk, is what you want to do.
So watch the memory utilization in Task Manager, and watch
the disk busy light on the scratch disk.
Another way to get enhanced performance, would be to buy a
couple Gigabyte iRAM products, and connect them to the
SATA ports on the Southbridge. That would give pretty well
the maximum scratch performance. Gigabyte only made a limited
number of those, and what I don't understand, is why they
weren't beaten to a pulp, by a patent holder of that
technology.
Note that the Gigabyte iRAM, uses the PCI slot
only for power, and is not PCI connected. That is just a
way to hold it mechanically in place. I believe you run
a SATA cable from the card, to a SATA port on your motherboard.
Some people on forums.2cpu.com tested the iRAM, and one
person tried to connect a bunch of them to an Areca RAID
controller. The experiment failed, because the SATA emulation
did not provide enough ID information to keep the RAID
firmware happy (lack of unique serial number???). It is
possible you could run them on an Intel Southbridge RAID
(matrix RAID), as some RAID implementations, like those
on chipsets, are not as picky. So before investing
big time, there is more research to do.
The iRAM holds 4GB, so with two in RAID0, you'd have 8GB
of scratch available.
You could also get a pair of Velociraptor disks, at
$300 each, and get virtually the same sustained RAID0 SATA
storage performance for scratch. That is about as
good as you can do, with the limits of the buses
on P4C800-E Deluxe.
With regard to installing 4GB of memory, and losing some,
the unaddressable RAM is a function of the video card
resident memory (as part of the address space reserved
for buses with cards on them). Machines of that era, might have
declared 3.2GB to 3.5GB free memory, when 4GB was present.
If you wanted to max the free memory seen in Windows, you
might use a PCI video card, one with a tiny resident
memory (like 16MB or 32MB). Since a Photoshop machine only
needs a frame buffer, it doesn't need a big video card.
It is unclear to me, how Photoshop used memory in Windows.
I understand, that for later versions, in the MacOS, that
memory which was not accessible to the program in the normal
way, might be used as scratch. So a Macintosh user, with
8GB of memory, as long as the OS could access the memory,
then memory outside of the program could still be used
for other purposes. I don't know what optimizations of that
sort, are available to Windows users.
You can see people playing with the concepts here, of
Photoshop versus WinXP 32bit. I don't want to get it
wrong, by trying to explain it. If Roger was around,
he could probably do a better job. After you read this,
you'll get a bit better feeling of how "uncertain" this
upgrade is. Thread is from May 2008. At least you'll get
some search terms to use, such as LARGEADDRESSAWARE .
Per jime:
>I am considering going to 4GB. I have several questions:
>
>If I go to 4GB will I see much of an increase in throughput?
I don't over clock, but I upped my P4P800-E from one gig (512 *
2) to four gigs.
Haven't run anything "official" or exhaustive in the way of
benchmarks, but the one that I did run suggests a slight decrease
in performance of an application as it reads records form a JET
database and caches them locally for display in one of it's
windows.
Was hoping to pick up some speed from disc caching, but I guess
not...
--
PeteCresswell
On Wed, 2 Jul 2008 13:06:08 -0400, "jime" <jimeiffe@comcast.net>
wrote:
>I am now overclocking my 3.0 cpu by 10%.
> (I edit photos and videos.)
>I will probably stay with my current MB another couple years.
>I am using 2GB of Mushkin memory.
>I am considering going to 4GB. I have several questions:
>
>If I go to 4GB will I see much of an increase in throughput?
>(I will have to discard my 4 sticks of 512mb.)
You will reduce thrashing. Short scenario is this: You read a program
from the hard drive (eg Photoshop) and it's loaded into memory. If
there is not enough room in memory, whatever is in memory has to be
pushed out to the swap file. The best way to check this would be to
install procexp.exe and see how much memory programs are using as you
operate http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...s/default.aspx
If the system has to swap (write) to disk while it's reading in a
program, the disk "thrashes" as it tries to do lots of reads and
writes concurrently. In addition, even if the program is small and
fits in memory, reading in a large image or video will cause programs
to be swapped to the disk. With some programs (like photoshop) just
bringing up a tool can cause a lot of swapping.
>Given the expense will the tradeoff be worth it?
>Will my MB utilize all 4GB? (I have read it will actually only use 3GB.)
It will likely improve performance, but how much will depend on
exactly what you edit and when.
>Can I use 'off the shelf' less expensive memory?
>What brands and types should I consider?
All memory is roughly equal in performance if it works (assuming the
same speed samples). Adding 2g of cheap memory will give you the same
performance as 2g of expensive memory. The difference is in
reliability. Cheaper memory will fail when pushed, particularly when
overclocked.
"- Bob -" <uctraing@ultranet.com> wrote in message
news:b08r64ljmnegh373mo8vpg4pgsr666t8mf@4ax.com...
/snip
> You will reduce thrashing. Short scenario is this: You read a program
> from the hard drive (eg Photoshop) and it's loaded into memory. If
> there is not enough room in memory, whatever is in memory has to be
> pushed out to the swap file. The best way to check this would be to
> install procexp.exe and see how much memory programs are using as you
> operate http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...s/default.aspx
>
/snip
Bob knows what he's talking about.
I added more memory to a PC that only had 512MB of RAM (it could have even
been 256MB, I can't quite remember), and was thrashing badly -> noise and a
hot hard drive.
It appears though that the damage had been done. The drive failled not long
after and had to be replaced.
"jime" <jimeiffe@comcast.net> wrote in message
news_ydnW2X4tceKPbVnZ2dnUVZ_t3inZ2d@comcast.com. ..
>I am now overclocking my 3.0 cpu by 10%.
> (I edit photos and videos.)
> I will probably stay with my current MB another couple years.
> I am using 2GB of Mushkin memory.
> I am considering going to 4GB. I have several questions:
>
> If I go to 4GB will I see much of an increase in throughput?
> (I will have to discard my 4 sticks of 512mb.)
> Given the expense will the tradeoff be worth it?
> Will my MB utilize all 4GB? (I have read it will actually only use 3GB.)
>
> Can I use 'off the shelf' less expensive memory?
> What brands and types should I consider?
>
> Your advice will be appreciated.
> Thanks.
> Jim
>
>
>
Hi JIm,
I actually using a P4C800-E Deluxe to type this now!.
I've had it for > 4 years.
I'm currently running 2GB of Samsung RAM with ECC that I bought off US ebay.
This board does take ECC RAM in case you did not know.
Menory upgrade for a P4C800-E Deluxe 
_ydnW2X4tceKPbVnZ2dnUVZ_t3inZ2d@comcast.com. ..
Linear Mode
