On upgrading your system beware of 16+ GBs RAM - Hell Corner

I was just curious... With an Ivy Bridge i5 CPU and 2x8GBs DDRs memory as shown in the CPU ID:



This is what "winsat" shows:



With a Coffee Lake i5 system, with 2x8GB DDR4 memory as shown in the CPU ID:



This is what "winsat" shows:



Why would a six years old system have better memory performance, than less than a year old system? At least according to "winsat"...

Hi there
depending on your workload the one thing I've found which will yield poor performance more than anything else on computers (assuming sensible amount of RAM) is not things like CPU or amount of RAM but the usually hideously slow nature of poor HDD's -- especially those older IDE ones with small cache sizes and operating at 5400 RPM.

Replacing even old equipment with SSD's for HDD's will immediately boost performance far beyond anything you could do by adding more RAM or even upgrading a CPU.

Obviously for Games a decent graphics card is important and provided the GPU is decent and the card has enough RAM Games won't be too much affected either by more RAM.

I'll go back to the original question again

assuming you aren't running extreme CPU bound processes the most important thing you can do to improve any system is optimise the I/O --SSD's are cheap enough now for daily use in an OS.

RAM shortage will not normally be a problem these days unless you want to run zillions of concurrent processes. RAM shortage can be detected if the Disk I/O is constant ("thrashing" this is called) Upgrading a CPU is normally only required if your machine is running constantly at 75% or higher.

Cheers
jimbo

Clintlgm said:

I don't know about all that, what I do know is that we're all running our RAM in Dual Channel mode which is intended to Read and Write to both Stick at the same time. Thus 800 GHz Ram in Dual Channel mode is 1600 GHz speed RAM, CL Timings and Voltage all need to match for Dual Channel to work. This is why RAM is sold in matching pairs.

according to current dual channel standards applied by manufacturers you can write sequentially to both sticks but are able to read from both sticks simultaneously so theoretically the bus is operating at dual speed but if all you wrote went to one stick then you are reading data at single rate even though the bus is running at dual speed .

if both your rams have fixed CL which is the industrial standard rams are forced to write sequentially .

the flickering method Kingston is currently using in their HyperX rams marks them as the first to fill both (or more) sticks simultaneously .

nIGHTmAYOR said:

according to current dual channel standards applied by manufacturers you can write sequentially to both sticks but are able to read from both sticks simultaneously so theoretically the bus is operating at dual speed but if all you wrote went to one stick then you are reading data at single rate even though the bus is running at dual speed .

if both your rams have fixed CL which is the industrial standard rams are forced to write sequentially .

the flickering method Kingston is currently using in their HyperX rams marks them as the first to fill both (or more) sticks simultaneously .

The flickering method might flicker at the same time on occasions, effectively falling back to writing to the same memory stick. On the surface, it seems that the memory sticks should be presented to the OS as a RAID 0 memory bank and stripe the writes across all available sticks.

Interesting way calculating the memory performance for the new system, just using the RAM speed and CL:

An easier way to compare two RAM modules, without doing so many calculations, is just to divide the frequency by the CAS Latency.

1866/10=186.6
1600/7=228.57

Source: What is the Real RAM speed and Should I get The Most MHz? | PCsteps.com

Cr00zng said:

On the surface, it seems that the memory sticks should be presented to the OS as a RAID 0 memory bank and stripe the writes across all available sticks.

the problem can be solved a zillion way , the aim of the post is to raise awareness that manufacturers are not doing anything about it till date and that more rams mean more sequential writing till date except for minor deviations such as hyperx.