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Ichinin
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26 Feb 2013, 6:00 pm

seaweasel wrote:

and my professor always says more ram is key

Memory helps but it isnt the only bottleneck in a system. In the 90s, there were much talk about having a small access time on the harddrive, which was good. Except people totally forgot about other factors like transfer speeds.

And yes, SSD's are a good way to get more performance fast. I ran 2 x OCZ SATA3 drives in Raid 0 (2 x 500 MB/s +) and a few games on it. Morrowind had NO loading times left and i zoned faster in MMOs.

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Ichinin
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26 Feb 2013, 6:02 pm

Feralucce wrote:

Why? because the current OS's are not written and the hard ware is not designed to do that... even with a large SSD as your primary HDD, you're still going to have some delay.

What exactly are you claiming?

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ScrewyWabbit
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26 Feb 2013, 6:44 pm

Ichinin wrote:

Feralucce wrote:

Why? because the current OS's are not written and the hard ware is not designed to do that... even with a large SSD as your primary HDD, you're still going to have some delay.

What exactly are you claiming?

I won't speak for Feralucce but I'd venture to guess that because a) the chips in an SSD are likely not as fast as standard system RAM and b) because an IDE/SATA bus (or however an SSD would be connected to the computer today) is not as fast as the bus between the CPU and RAM, accessing an SSD is not going to be nearly as fast as main memory.

That said, an SSD is of course going to be far faster than any physical spinning disc. Just not as fast as RAM.

For something like that, you'd need SSD quantities of actual system RAM and support for a RAMdisk to be designed into the O/S at a low level.

Ichinin
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26 Feb 2013, 6:55 pm

ScrewyWabbit wrote:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9UsqJ_o5wQ[/youtube]

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Feralucce
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26 Feb 2013, 7:35 pm

I am not CLAIMING anything... What I am stating is that an SSD can speed up a system a great deal, but to claim that it can take the place of RAM by acting as a scratch disk is a bit silly.

You have to keep one important thing in mind... No matter how fast the device is within itself - it is still limited by the method of connection and transfer.

Recent developments in CONSUMER available ram have the capability of 20gb/s on a single 32bit channel, allowing for 160gb/s transfer on a standard front side ram bus.

Compare that to the transfer rate of Sata 2.0 ... 300 mb/s and sata 3.0 at 600mb/s...

Ram will always have it's function until there is a mother board that supports a ram style interface for SSDs that takes advantage of the possible power of the device itself.

Until then, an SSD will speed up your system, but RAM is necessary for smooth operation, no matter how big your scratch disk is.

If you doubt this, do your own practical test with a resource hog application, such as adobe premiere.

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MXH
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26 Feb 2013, 7:49 pm

Feralucce wrote:

I never claimed it would be as fast as say 1600 ddr3 ram. But most people don't have that type of ram. And most times ram isn't even used for paging that much. In reality anything over 8gb is likely to be overkill for a typical person. Now an ssd with appropriate sata3 connection will do more for a system than ram ever will. Especially on loading times and even more n the typical consumer system. My puny atom powered tablet with emmc (slower than an ssd) and only 2gb of ram feel like it flies compared to my laptop. It more than makes up for processing power on loading things and browsing. Only in intense applications can you reach the cpu bottleneck

Ichinin
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26 Feb 2013, 7:55 pm

Feralucce wrote:

I am not CLAIMING anything...

No, you did say something sort of truncated about operating systems that did not make any sense:

Quote:

because the current OS's are not written and the hard ware...

(And if you read closer what i wrote earlier, you will find that i am very aware of the speeds in SSD-SATA3 devices and how to overcome those kinds of limitations.)

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Feralucce
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26 Feb 2013, 8:30 pm

The current OS's are written for the current hardware. The hardware is not designed to do that...

I did read your statements in its entirety... I outlined what I did to make my point.
As for ram... according to PC magazine... ddr3 is the most commonly used ram in PCs today.

Simply put, it is a workaround... but only a work around.

If you are doing more than surfing the web or word processing, it will produce unacceptable results. Especially if you game, watch any HD video or do anything system intensive... you won't be happy with the results.

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sliqua-jcooter
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26 Feb 2013, 10:24 pm

This is dumb.

There is no *one* solution to increasing performance in a system. If your application is memory-bound, you increase the memory - if it's IO bound you either increase the IOPS (which using SSDs definitely does accomplish) or offload IOPS, if it's CPU-bound, you increase the number of cores.

RAM is obviously faster than flash-based MLC memory - for one thing, the physical operation required to store memory in a non-volatile way takes longer than storing a charge while the system has power. Then there's also the MLC mechanism that is used to compute the value of multiple bits per bit of storage - which adds processing delay. And then you have the delay caused by the HBA cache on the system to throw data onto the I/O bus - and then the obvious bit where anything stored on disk has to be loaded into RAM before it can be accessed by the CPU anyway.

This, however, is completely irrelevant - because you aren't using RAM as a filesystem (usually).

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BlueMax
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27 Feb 2013, 1:42 am

seaweasel wrote:

do you see any real "big" differences bewteen intel and AMD? i upgraded to a A8-3850 and to be honest i cant see a speed difference bewteen this quad core CPU and my sisters quad core cpu(i7)

It depends greatly on what you're doing. General web-viewing, listening to music, etc... you don't see a huge difference because none will overtax a single core. Some of the HUGE games/applications need as much power as you can throw at it.

Your choice of CPU is cool... it's an "APU" with quite good graphics on-board for free - enough video power to tackle modern games at moderate settings... 2-3x faster than Intel's "free" graphics.

Very affordable all-round decent choice. :thumright:

Kenjuudo
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27 Feb 2013, 8:10 am

ScrewyWabbit wrote:

seaweasel wrote:

ahh i remember hyperthreading in my old Pentium 4, i honestly think its just a marketing gimmick.

and my professor always says more ram is key

i have 8GB ram and only use 3GB usually, but the key thing here is the more ram you have the more disk cache is built so less disk access

Agree, more RAM in an O/S like Windows always helps. I have 9GB and don't really hit any memory issues like I do at work where I only have 4GB and often have to have a lot of stuff open at once like Excel, Word, 2-3 instances of Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Oracle SQL Developer etc.

In any case I haven't really had a chance to use a computer with an SSD yet, but I have to think that having the paging file on an SSD would be a BIG help, even for machines with not so much RAM.

You know you can have multiple projects open at the same time in a single Visual Studio instance, right? Why do you need 2-3 instances?

On topic:
Having an SSD helps a lot, but don't compare it to RAM. Two completely different worlds.

Grabbed some bandwidth figures from a random site:
SSD: Intel 520 SSD ~500 MB/s sequential access and only 30-50 MB/s using random access.
RAM: DDR3 1600 ~20,000 GB/s.

RAM is also inherently random access; no extra controller needed.

Trying to use an SSD as RAM would also destroy the SSD pretty much immediately, because of RAM data swapping and the fact that SSDs don't take more than ~2000 overwrites to a cell before reading the cell back becomes unreliable.

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BlueMax
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27 Feb 2013, 10:09 am

We can boil this down to simply; take care of RAM first - make sure you always have enough for the biggest applications you run simultaneously.

Once RAM is good, then move on to SSD for further possible gains.

I know it's after-the-fact but that AMD APU the OP has differs from Intel in one critical way - the onboard Radeon graphics get a huge speed jump from the speed of system RAM. If you have DDR3-1600 with heat spreaders, your free graphics will get faster for games if you overclock that RAM to 1833, etc.

sliqua-jcooter
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27 Feb 2013, 10:12 am

BlueMax wrote:

I know it's after-the-fact but that AMD APU the OP has differs from Intel in one critical way - the onboard Radeon graphics get a huge speed jump from the speed of system RAM. If you have DDR3-1600 with heat spreaders, your free graphics will get faster for games if you overclock that RAM to 1833, etc.

That's assuming the bus can operate at the increased clock speed. Overclocking RAM speed is essentially useless if the bus can't keep up.

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BlueMax
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27 Feb 2013, 12:24 pm

I wouldn't suggest it then. The FM1/FM2 platform usually can, depenting on the board MFR, and benchmarks show significant video gains from doing so. Mostly video... if you're not gaming with the onboard video, it's irrelevant.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1652/3/

The biggest jump is from 1333 RAM to 1600 though... going above that will have smaller gains than I thought.

MXH
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27 Feb 2013, 12:48 pm

BlueMax wrote:

This is what immsaying. That there comes a moment where more ram isn't going to do much of a performance increase because the os will not use the extra. That's usually around 8gb for most people. After that before going into 16gb+ of ram I'd do an ssd and get a much more sorted system.

BlueMax
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27 Feb 2013, 1:09 pm

Yep - or people that buy low-end video cards for games...

*cry* "...but the card has 2GB of RAM on it!"

Yeah, well it's still a GeForce 610 - the slowest speed graphics processor in the lineup... and it's the processor that does the work.

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