Will more RAM always speed things up?

[The Old Timer]

A friend has suggested that my encoding would go quite a bit faster if I added more RAM to my PC. My motherboard supports dual core but only has one stick of 1GB RAM. I'm skeptical that adding a secord stick would improve things my much if any thing at all. It's Pentium 4 3GB processor. What do you think?

[seehowyouare]

A friend has suggested that my encoding would go quite a bit faster if I added more RAM to my PC. My motherboard supports dual core but only has one stick of 1GB RAM. I'm skeptical that adding a secord stick would improve things my much if any thing at all. It's Pentium 4 3GB processor. What do you think?

How much memory is in use now ?
It won't make a scrap of difference if you currently have lots of RAM free during encoding. Faster RAM might help but not that much.

Do you think your encoding is slow ? Why ? Example times ? What do you think the bottleneck in the encoding process is ?

Have you run any benchmarking tools that show any possible issues ?

I run an overclocked AMD and that's my bottleneck.

When encoding I turn antivirus off and make sure my input and output files are on different drives (different channels also). And I make sure I have the latest versions of whatever tools I am running.

I don't want to spend any more money ATM so I am tweaking my hard drives. Registry settings, latest motherboard drivers, moved pagefile to separate SATA drive etc etc and will play with cluster sizes next. HDTach is helpful. I tried SiSoft Sandra (?) free version but it didn't like my 4 x SATA drive, 4 x ATA drive setup and barfed often. Let me know if you find a overall benchmarking tool that works well.

Cheers

[CWR03]

With 1GB of RAM already in place, adding more won't make a significant difference. Of all the factors that determine encoding speed, RAM isn't the most important to begin with, and 1GB is plenty.

[seehowyouare]

The biggest decider is CPU speed.

Once you hit a brickwall with overclocking it's time to tune the software.

BTW, I forgot to mention an important tool in my hard disk tuning

Filemon lets me see what is accessing the hard disks in real time.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html

I ran it and saw that my anti virus solution accessing it's own ini file from disk every 5 seconds and so was a service I had running. I moved the anti virus to the same drive the pagefile is on (and tweaked how it scanned) and also disabled a few unimportant services. My system drive light only goes on when I do something, instead of it flashing every other few seconds and my system is much more responsive.

Cheers

PS - Has anyone noticed any differences in encoding using AMD64 with XP 32 bit & 32 bit encoding tools vs AMD64 with 64bit OS & 64bit tools ?

[jggimi]

Moving to PC H/W S/W forum.

[deets]

tomshardware did a piece about this a while ago, not sure how much it applies as its not a 1gb/2gb comparison.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/13/how_much_ram_do_you_really_need/


if you have only one stick of ram, it cant run in dual channel mode, which apparantly could slow things down. from what I read (been a while since i built a p4 system) the p4 benefits a lot more from dual channel.

[videomixer9]

Also get sure your CPU has enough cache, e.g. 512KB is imo not enough for 4 GB, you still can even have a slowdown with more RAM and small cache. A good speed gain with more RAM is only to be seen with large databases and other really RAM consuming tasks, even games don't take that much RAM anymore, e.g. NFS:Most Wanted barely uses 350MB for me, the hunger there is for more graphics RAM.

I doubt you can bloat up things much more in the future, and even many bloat in coming OSes will be in need of more graphics RAM rather than system RAM.

Dualchannel, 128bit vs. 64bit memory connection it was iirc, I use it myself on an Athlon XP and it seemed to speed up some things as I tried before without. Not that much though.

[DVD_GR]

Moving to PC H/W S/W forum.

well we could support him at octech,but we can help him here too!
1.Dual channel performance improvement is big at p4 systems...
so if you have just 1 stick as mentioned go dual channel urgently,
the speed loss is gr8.
If you are already dual channel,and have the money for changing memories,
the amount of memory will have nothing to do for performance...
BUT the timings will have to do.....
So find memory sticks capable of at least 2.5-2-2-5
instead of 3-3-3-8 which is the default of most cheap memories,
and tight the latencies...the diffirence will me much,if you use memory bandwidth consuming applications...
If you can afford it find sticks to do 2-2-2-5 at least over 230....and will thank me after you use them..:P :P
hope I helped!

[HardwareGeek]

A friend has suggested that my encoding would go quite a bit faster if I added more RAM to my PC. My motherboard supports dual core but only has one stick of 1GB RAM. I'm skeptical that adding a secord stick would improve things my much if any thing at all. ... What do you think?

Your skepticism is correct. The bottleneck in encoding is the CPU, not the memory. Most benchmarks do not show much improvement in going from 1GB of RAM to 2GB. Putting a second memory stick in and running in dual-channel mode should help some applications, but I don't think that it will help your encoding that much. That being said, what you could do, is go get a second stick of memory, stick it in and see if it helps. You can alway return the stick (within two weeks, most places) if it doesn't help, or keep it if it does help.