1gb Fast RAM or 2gb Slow?

[glen8]

Building a new PC which among other things will be for CCE encoding

Do I get 1gb of fast RAM or 2gb slow?

Thanks v. much :-)

[Trahald]

This is a hardware question.. (what you use your hardware for doesnt make the topic) so this is best answered in the hardware forum

[Guest]

Get 1GB of fast RAM. Then save up for the second stick. :)

[CWR03]

This question really depends more on what your primary use for the machine would be. I'd say if it's mostly gaming, go with 1GB of fast. Also look at the CAS number of the RAM - dropping down a step on the speed (i. e. PC3200 to PC2700) to go from 2.5 CAS to 2 would actually be faster. Of course, a faster speed and a lower CAS together would be even better. If speed isn't as big an issue as overall performance, you might be better off with more of a slower RAM, if for example you work with lots of large files like uncompressed AVI or creating MPEG-2. I don't think encoding to XviD/DivX would be affected with more RAM, since it never opens the entire file. I recently replaced a single 512 stick with a 1gig stick (both were CAS 2) and encoding speed was unaffected.

[glen8]

Thanks very much for your reply. The system will never be used for games and I doubt I'll be working with uncompressed avi anymore (used to but not now).

It's primaray use will be for encoding with cce

[theReal]

Encoding never uses much RAM. From my experience ~50-100 MB is what most encoders use, if avisynth is involved it might get a bit more as avisynth by default reserves a quarter of the amount of free RAM (but it also doesn't really need more than 50MB to work properly).

That being said the conclusion is: get 1GB of fast RAM with low CAS timings :)

[Sirber]

With x264 CLI it goes up to 300 on my machine :)

[video_magic]

In the past (I think around ~1997) I had read that you need to have enough L1 and/or L2 cache to support your RAM or performance is affected negatively if you have more ram.
Example that I remember was in the days when 64mb was considered a lot and there used to be a common choice of either 256K or 512K cache on board. I remember the article was saying that to go above 64mb of ram on a board that only had 256kb would lead to a speed drop of around 10% unless the cache was also upgraded to 512kb. I believe I also remember that the article was mentioning the L1 cache on the chip and was saying about workstation chips like P2 Xeons that had larger caches of like 1mb where they use 'large' (at that time) amounts of ram of like >128mbs of ram.

So anyway, all I'm saying is: if you are going to be dealing with 1gb or 2gb of RAM and are concerned with speed I think you ought to consider how much cache you have and I know there are pentium 4 chips and I don't know about AMD, that have 1mb cache maybe more - you might need to look at that. Like I say though, that article was from around 1997.
I think there is a certain point where having huge amounts of ram won't help unless you are actually going to be loading equivalently big files into memory and so it won't need to keep on paging from the hard disk (virtual memory disk cache)

[movax]

Remember that you don't really need sticks of RAM with uber-high speeds (PC3700 and the such) if you're not OCing. newegg currently has good prices on CAS2 PC3200 2x512 sticks, $77 + S&H iirc. :) Reputable brands too, as off-brand RAM causes more trouble then it solves.