settle argument over ram upgrade

[rsuave5]

i recently installed another 256 ram to my sony vaio i had 512 ddram and i installed another 256 block for 768. my buddy says that ram should only be installed in two equal blocks. i say that ddram can be installed in any combo.i see a slight enhancement in rendering and start-up but the change is negligible as i expected i just wanted to boost the performance of premieres rendering and tmpgenc encoding times any educated opinions?

[jeex]

well back in the old days of the pentium 1 cpu's, you had to install ram in matching size pairs.. you also have to do it when you're installing rambus ram.. anything else, i dont think it matters..

as for improving encoding times.. the only way you'll see a significant difference is if you get a better cpu.. memory wont help much, if at all.. but it does help starting applications and keeping your computer from slagging off as quickly.

[WeedVender]

I encode during safe mode.. goes 3 times quicker...

and Ram does improve encoding speed but after 512 it doesnt matter anymore.

[gmatov]

Weed,
Are you serious? You actually reboot into safe mode?
Iknow it loads a "minimal set of drivers", etc, but was unaware the encoding programs would work.

[rsuave5]

i will look into that and i agree after 512 there is not a big performance jump thanx

[Ducatti20]

BAH!!! No such thing as too much ram!!
That being said, after 512mb you're pretty much into overkill, but it helps keep your swap file from being accessed so much.

[q1aqza]

I'm not sure but what I think your buddy meant was that DDR RAM is most effective in pairs. They certainly can be installed singularly but I think the double data rate aspect of DDR RAM is achieved in pairs.

[bugster]

I'm not sure but what I think your buddy meant was that DDR RAM is most effective in pairs. They certainly can be installed singularly but I think the double data rate aspect of DDR RAM is achieved in pairs.

Wrong I am afraid, it basically depends on the chipset. A number of newer chipsets (Nforce for athlon and some Intel thingy) use Dual Channel DDR ram, basically doubling the bandwidth. However, these do require Dimms to be added in pairs to take advantage of the extra performance this gives. Adding single Dimms is possible but you will actually lose performance if you do so as the whole memory system then works in single channel mode.


As for the original poster, he said:

i recently installed another 256 ram to my sony vaio

Isn't that a laptop? I am not aware of any laptop chipsets that support Dual channel memory (please feel free to correct me if I am wrong on this) so you are quite safe.

[rallynavvie]

The only thing I find useful when I add RAM is so that a number of applications can be open at the same time without too much system slowdown. This is especially useful when working with about 4 Adobe apps at the same time or when I've got a few encoding/editing apps sitting open. It's also nice so that you can load more system tray processes, like the latest Netscape, so that it's virtually open all the time.

The only performance increase when encoding I could think of would be saving data on a 2-pass VBR run. I'm assuming that doesn't cache the bitrate calculations on a hard disk, right? That would be pretty silly if you've got all that RAM asking for something to hold in memory

[WeedVender]

Weed,
Are you serious? You actually reboot into safe mode?
Iknow it loads a "minimal set of drivers", etc, but was unaware the encoding programs would work.

Yeah thats right. I encode during safe mode. CCE, TMPGenc, and i think Mainconcept can do it too. playing th output is another story and I ussualy reboot to normal mode to preview, edit, burn...

[Doggiedaddy]

RAMBUS must be installed in pairs.
Dd

[rsuave5]

sony vaio is a laptop and a desktop and a kick ass one at that i have a desktop

[q1aqza]

Wrong I am afraid, it basically depends on the chipset. A number of newer chipsets (Nforce for athlon and some Intel thingy) use Dual Channel DDR ram, basically doubling the bandwidth. However, these do require Dimms to be added in pairs to take advantage of the extra performance this gives. Adding single Dimms is possible but you will actually lose performance if you do so as the whole memory system then works in single channel mode.

Thanks for putting me straight on that. I recently upgraded to an NForce chipset which is why I must have picked up on the double bandwidth capability and guess I thought it applied to the memory and not the chipset.

[freak_in_cage_10k]

WeedVender- 2 things m8!

1stly, out of interest, the latter part of your user name wouldn;t be some version of the french word "Vendre"- "To Sell" or is it just luck/sum other meaning lol?

2nd- are you honestly telling me that, when using CCE you can encode at 3x the speed just by booting in safe mode? I use dvd2svcd and cce2.50 and i encode at about 1.5 (check my pc specs) (thats from a dvd source). You reckon i can get over 3 times the speed of real time just by booting in safe mode???? no way man! that sounds too good to be true!!!! i have just checked your system specs- maybe its sumthing to do with your dual processor which makes safe mode so effective?!

PS sorry to repeat gmatovs question but man, it does seem a bit dreamy!!!

PPS also, what speed do u encode at? you wonder at what point the cpu becomes less of a bottleneck and the hard drive speeds comes into play? i see you have 5 HDs but u dont mension whether they are in any kind of raid array? I want to get a 2nd HD and have the source ifo files on 1 ide channel (pri master) and the output files on the secondary master, that way u get well fast transferr rates!