Is there any reason to have 8 GB of RAM?

[NyteOwl]

One nice use is to create a ramdisk in Linux using tempfs, move the system there and run from memory. lightening fast response. Mind you you need to either recompile the kernel with PAE enabled which is a bit of a kludge or use a 64-bit version to use all 8GB but it is nice once you do

[waxbytes]

Originally Posted by zlojack

Yeah, but there's a difference between having something that's fast and having something that's there and never gets used.

I mean, what's the point of 4GB of RAM sitting there in your system never being used?

If you somehow use even a bit more of it...say 6GB in some application, then good, but otherwise, it seems to me that it's a waste.

My Task Manager informs me that I have 8190 MB total physical memory and that 6800 MB is currently cached and 53 MB are free. The kernel has a hold of 768 MB at the moment. So right now Vista 64 is holding my most commonly used applications in RAM waiting to open quickly. I would say then that my 8GB of RAM is being well used and not wasted, even if the result does not show up as fps.

[zlojack]

Originally Posted by waxbytes

My Task Manager informs me that I have 8190 MB total physical memory and that 6800 MB is currently cached and 53 MB are free. The kernel has a hold of 768 MB at the moment. So right now Vista 64 is holding my most commonly used applications in RAM waiting to open quickly. I would say then that my 8GB of RAM is being well used and not wasted, even if the result does not show up as fps.

Hey, if it's working for you, that's good. I wasn't expecting it to show up as FPS...we're not talking about VRAM here, after all

[waxbytes]

Originally Posted by zlojack

Hey, if it's working for you, that's good. I wasn't expecting it to show up as FPS...we're not talking about VRAM here, after all

Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are several ways to use RAM and it's not always something that's easy to measure, like frames per second.
How can we measure something so vague as "snappier response"?
Especially when 4 GB is very responsive anyway.

[zlojack]

Originally Posted by waxbytes

Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are several ways to use RAM and it's not always something that's easy to measure, like frames per second.
How can we measure something so vague as "snappier response"?
Especially when 4 GB is very responsive anyway.

You mean "snappier response" is not a scientific term?

[waxbytes]

Originally Posted by zlojack

You mean "snappier response" is not a scientific term?

I suppose one could say that they built the Hadron Collider solely for it's "snappier response"