Who use more than 4GB of RAM?

[tlarkin]

I have 2 reasons for having 8GB of RAM

1. I got it dirt cheap when i got it

2. I play gmod, which, like every other sandbox game, is a bitch for memory. You need atleast 2GB just to spawn about 40 props, and as with most stuff you need alot more than that, you can end up using maybe 3GB+ just on gmod, that isn't taking into account the stuff going on behind it, so 3GB for that, 2GB for windows and sometimes I would play with music up too and the internet, which don't use much, but on a normal system with maybe 2GB of memory, that would make it grind to a halt

Gary's Mod takes up that much resources? I guess if it has to do any real time rendering it could be a pain in the butt, but even then it would run really slow. Most of that sort of stuff is highly CPU intensive.

You should run a sample of the process while you are playing it, as I would like to see if it really takes up that much RAM.

Oh, and of course if you get a good deal on RAM it is not a bad thing to buy more than you need. It just can be a waste of money sometimes. I know a guy who put 8gigs of RAM in his PC to play video games, and he of course bought the expensive gaming RAM. Most of that stuff is just marketing bull crap to get you to buy more stuff.

When I mentioned a control system, you can look at it from the same way developers do. What is the averaged specification of the average house hold or business PC? Then write code for your product based on that average so you hit your market demographic. Obviously, video games are going to be marketed towards gamers, but still the game developers do think about what is the average specification of current generation hardware they can code for. Which is why games don't have ridiculous system requirements. So, really if you want to compare your system's performance you need to compare it to a control system, or your average computer that is currently out there.

 

[linkin]

my dad's pentium 4 laptop has 512mb of ram. on idle it uses 80mb of RAM. this is fully updated to service pack 3.



It's dead slow because of the pentium 4 though. It's actually a desktop processor. (socket 478 according to cpuz)

 

[poke349]

I rarely go over 6 - 8GB from "normal" use. (excluding ram drives)
However... I do a lot of "not-so-normal" things on my computers. (ie. running and testing code)

Check my sig for what I have.


Before I moved to my i7 machine (which only has 12GB of ram), I would typically run a massive ram drive (20GB+) on my workstation when I'm not using all my ram.
Then I'd copy all my games to it and run it from there.

My i7 machine is better for gaming and normal use. So it's my primary computer now. I've retired my workstation to only code-testing.

EDIT:

 

[Bodaggit23]

EDIT:

^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Uhmm...holy $hit...

 

[Laquer Head]

8GB of DDR3 in my laptop..

8GB of DDR3 in my PC..

1GB of DDR2 in my netbook...(LOL)

 

[Candy]

I have 4GB DDR2 but I just had a look and it only uses about 1.3GB when I'm doing simple things such as internet and music and when I have a game open it uses about 2.3GB.

 

[Bodaggit23]

I have 4GB DDR2 but I just had a look and it only uses about 1.3GB when I'm doing simple things such as internet and music and when I have a game open it uses about 2.3GB.

With what OS?

 

[Candy]

Windows 7 Pro x64

 

[Springy182]

my dad's pentium 4 laptop has 512mb of ram. on idle it uses 80mb of RAM. this is fully updated to service pack 3.



It's dead slow because of the pentium 4 though. It's actually a desktop processor. (socket 478 according to cpuz)

I'd be willing to bet it gets pretty toasty when in use.

Socket 478 was both a laptop and desktop socket, Intel made mobile P4 chips for 478.

 

[curtains]

wow nice to see people responded to my thread, after a few hours, that's cool. Yeah i have 4GB in my I7 system and I don't use more than 2.5GB, though i guess the things i run arn't really memory intensive.

Running Win XP.

 

[tlarkin]

I rarely go over 6 - 8GB from "normal" use. (excluding ram drives)
However... I do a lot of "not-so-normal" things on my computers. (ie. running and testing code)

Check my sig for what I have.


Before I moved to my i7 machine (which only has 12GB of ram), I would typically run a massive ram drive (20GB+) on my workstation when I'm not using all my ram.
Then I'd copy all my games to it and run it from there.

My i7 machine is better for gaming and normal use. So it's my primary computer now. I've retired my workstation to only code-testing.

EDIT:

Can you be more specific when you say code testing? I can write a perl script that will loop infinitely and eventually take up all your CPU and RAM. That doesn't mean that I need 20GB of RAM but it does mean that I can write a script that eats up that much.

I would be interested in hearing what you are doing with your rig.

 

[poke349]

Can you be more specific when you say code testing? I can write a perl script that will loop infinitely and eventually take up all your CPU and RAM. That doesn't mean that I need 20GB of RAM but it does mean that I can write a script that eats up that much.

I would be interested in hearing what you are doing with your rig.

I do a bunch of HPC stuff, but only a few of them require a lot of ram.


The primary ram-intensive code-testing I do is on this:
http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/

(I do a bunch of other CPU-intensive stuff, but this is really the only thing that needs more than 10GB ton of ram.)


But that was a while ago, now I mostly do testing on disk-intensive code using ram drives.


The last thing I use the ram for (but not commonly) is to future-proof things via brute-force 64-bit portability testing.

A lot of 32-bit programs will break when you when you use too much ram (even when compiled for x64) because their indexing overflows.
For example, if you're indexing an array of 4-byte integers using a 32-bit integer, it will wrap around when that array exceeds 16GB. And if you're indexing DP floating-point, you'll need more than 32GB.
I've caught some pretty big and embarrassing bugs in the Microsoft Visual Studio compiler related to this... (by accident, but still...)


That pretty much sums it up. My friends and I do a ton of other ram + cpu intensive stuff on these computers (such as rendering), but those rarely go over 10GB.

 

[tlarkin]

OK, you do threshold and debugging testing. Yeah I have found some pretty retarded bugs myself over the years. I mean you would think that software engineers would think about certain things when developing a new product. However, a lot of the times they do not. In the past I have actually gotten to speak to a few developers over paid tech support for certain problems. When it came down to the developer asking me why I was doing something that way, and I explained it and they were like, "Oh, well I never thought you could do it that way."

Aren't these people suppose to be geniuses? They sure as hell make more money than I do, so maybe I expect a bit more out of them?

I just don't get my MS won't go to a library file system that holds code for both 32 and 64 bit support natively, and then let the 32bit code access the 32bit library files. Why on Earth they make 32bit and 64bit separate versions is beyond my capacity to think logically, other than they want to make a few extra dollars off it.

 

[poke349]

OK, you do threshold and debugging testing. Yeah I have found some pretty retarded bugs myself over the years. I mean you would think that software engineers would think about certain things when developing a new product. However, a lot of the times they do not. In the past I have actually gotten to speak to a few developers over paid tech support for certain problems. When it came down to the developer asking me why I was doing something that way, and I explained it and they were like, "Oh, well I never thought you could do it that way."

Aren't these people suppose to be geniuses? They sure as hell make more money than I do, so maybe I expect a bit more out of them?

I just don't get my MS won't go to a library file system that holds code for both 32 and 64 bit support natively, and then let the 32bit code access the 32bit library files. Why on Earth they make 32bit and 64bit separate versions is beyond my capacity to think logically, other than they want to make a few extra dollars off it.

I'll admit that these uses have come because I had the computer in the first place.

That workstation was originally built to break a few computing records. But after that was done, I had to find my own uses for that thing. Otherwise, I'd feel bad for wasting all that ram.

And since then, I've carried all those "new uses" to my other computers.