Tech question about RAM (mostly OT)

[Scratch]

Do you know what "socket" type you've got? Since you've got an Athlon64, you have either a 939 or 754. If it's a 939, you're in luck...dual core Athlon64's should be out before the end of the year. That would definitely be an upgrade worth considering. With dual cores, you'll essentially be getting 2 CPUs on one physical chip, which means MUCH better multi-tasking ability.

[bort411]

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Do you know what "socket" type you've got? Since you've got an Athlon64, you have either a 939 or 754. If it's a 939, you're in luck...dual core Athlon64's should be out before the end of the year. That would definitely be an upgrade worth considering. With dual cores, you'll essentially be getting 2 CPUs on one physical chip, which means MUCH better multi-tasking ability.

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754. I've read about this, but I don't think I'll be upgrading to 939 for a year or two. The price compared to the performace increase doesn't look like it will be worth it to me in the near future. Probably when Windows 64 gets up and running I'll go with that chip.

[wonderwes]

This is my recommendation for a case. I own it, it has tons of exhaust fans, and it is so quiet.

Antec Sonata

[fluxrad]

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I'm usually running at least 5 of the following:

Pokertracker (updating every 2 minutes)
iTunes
Between 5 and 20 windows of poker
DVD applications (either ripping, encoding, writing, or watching)
WinTV
Firefox
Thunderbird
AIM
Word
File transfer clients (usually about 25 transfers)

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And you wonder why your box is pegged?

[bort411]

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I'm usually running at least 5 of the following:

Pokertracker (updating every 2 minutes)
iTunes
Between 5 and 20 windows of poker
DVD applications (either ripping, encoding, writing, or watching)
WinTV
Firefox
Thunderbird
AIM
Word
File transfer clients (usually about 25 transfers)

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And you wonder why your box is pegged?

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No. I wondered if I could use more of my memory to improve performance.

[Kablooie]

Almost certainly not.

From that list of applications i would suspect you are disk and cpu bound. The dvd ripping is probably doing the most damage on both counts.

Basically it's like this. Historically there has always been a major bottleneck somewhere on your pc, caused by a drastic mismatch in relative throughput speeds between different components. This used to be the network card in the days of dialup connections, now it's the disk drive which really hasn't increased that much in speed in the last few years, (cpu has typically gone up by a factor of 10 in the same time), and the backplane of the computer - unless you've got a 64 bit PCI bus - and even then.

To speed things up for that kind of application mix, the best thing would be to get fast SCSI disks, since you have the 64 bit computer - they're not that cheap though.

[Nfinity]

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Then what programs are you running that are giving you 100% cpu utilisation?

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I'm usually running at least 5 of the following:

Pokertracker (updating every 2 minutes)
iTunes
Between 5 and 20 windows of poker
DVD applications (either ripping, encoding, writing, or watching)
WinTV
Firefox
Thunderbird
AIM
Word
File transfer clients (usually about 25 transfers)


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I would suggest a dedicated machine for file transfer and DVD/MP3 ripping. Your CPU will thank you for it.

[UncleDuke]

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A gig of RAM is just nice to have. As other posters have said, 512MB is more than enough.

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I'm not a technical guru, but I thought I'd mention this anyway. In my experiece, the extra RAM does help if you use pokertracker. I was having problems during certain PT operations (particularly compacting/backing up the database) where the RAM was getting all used up. This hadn't happened until recently and was probably because my database is getting pretty large, probably close to needing to start a second one. I recently added another 512 of RAM (had 768 before that), and it's helped quite a bit.

[Blarg]

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A gig of RAM is just nice to have. As other posters have said, 512MB is more than enough. But more importantly, I don't understand why you believe that using all of your RAM is critical. I have 1GB of RAM in my box and barely ever use it all (except for playing something system intensive like Half-Life 2 or Doom 3).

Don't worry about it, and be happy your box isn't swapping like the dickens. If you really feel that strongly about it, drop it down to 512MB and send me the gig you have left over [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

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My guess is that he's hearing his hard drive grinding all the time and wants to hear less of that, so he's wondering if some of the constant write to disk could be cut back.

I've noticed that my computer can seem to grind its HD like crazy too when I'm playing 8 tables and importing from them on Pokertracker.

I've solved this problem in a few small steps.

First, I put pokertracker on a separate disk, so I can do disk intensive things without writing on the same disk so often, and often getting laggy results because of it.

Second, I time my pokertracker imports. I will generally have imports at around 15 minutes per site, and if the imports are timed close together, it can sound like constant disk grinding and lead to big slowdowns and even delays and disconnects from the tables. Making one site auto-import at minute 7 and one at minute 15 takes care of that.

Add ons can slow things down, too. Gametime was getting a little notoriety when it first came out because of that problem. Now I restart gametime after a few hours.

Finally, the Party skins put hand histories on your hard disk, and the more hand histories and tables there are, the more imports and database collating can slow down as pokertracker churns through more and more data. Deleting or moving handhistories from tables you have left or from previous periods of time can help keep imports quicker and result in much less HD grinding.

A little note on games, just from my personal experience -- I used to be a big time RTS game and MMORPG game player, and found that 512 seemed to be a minimum for good gameplay in varied situations -- both these types of games are constantly reading and writing to disks as many factors in their game "worlds" are constantly changing and being recorded, and memory is very quickly filled. It's often not enough, and I've noticed in multiple games a significant benefit to going up to at least 768 of RAM, and often but not always a notable difference between 768 RAM and a full gig of RAM. Depending on the games you play, your mileage my vary.

For multi-taskers like me, there are often web pages and other things up no matter what you're doing, so I'd strongly recommend a gig of RAM to almost anyone at this point.

[Blarg]

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I'm usually running at least 5 of the following:

Pokertracker (updating every 2 minutes)
iTunes
Between 5 and 20 windows of poker
DVD applications (either ripping, encoding, writing, or watching)
WinTV
Firefox
Thunderbird
AIM
Word
File transfer clients (usually about 25 transfers)

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And you wonder why your box is pegged?

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That kinda blew me away too.

The DVD ripping etc is already pretty crazy, but importing into Pokertracker every 2 minutes is also clearly going to be a strain.

If I were playing 20 tables, I'd be doing it on at least two computers, preferably three.