DK wrote:

With the last couple machines that I've built, I've started with
enough RAM to last the life of the machine, which is 4-5 years in my
household. The 2G that I have in my current machine may be overkill
for XP or Linux today, but will likely be "needed" 3 years from now...

Kramer wrote:

Careful, though, if you plan on using DDR-400 in that board, it may
limit you to 800MHz FSB, in which case a CPU designed for 1066 FSB,
such as the C2D, would be underclocked.

"DK" <dk (AT) no (DOT) email.thankstospam.net> wrote

My Canon software opens files that are around 5MB in size. If I open 10-20
of them (50MB -100MB of files) and do some work in all of them (change white
balance, crop, resize, convert from canon raw format to JPG etc), I can fill
my 1.5GB RAM very quickly. My point is, don't be fooled by filesize - this
has nothing to do with how much RAM the software will use.

Once your 50MB files are opened and manipulated, you will definitely use
more than 50MB RAM - I would expect you could easily be using 500MB RAM
before you do barely anything!. All depends on the software and what you are
doing.

The FSB will run at 1066 and will async the memory to run at a lower speed.
I used this board to upgrade to a Core 2 last fall and keep my existing
PC-3200 ram and ATI 9800pro. It ran the two speeds flawlessly. The only
issue I came across is that when I put in my Crucial Ballistix DDR400 ram I
was having issues. Turns out that the solution was to go with generic
DDR400 because this motherboard didn't like the 2-2-2-6 timings of the high
performance Crucial and the Crucial didn't like to run stable at slower
speeds based on my testing it in a few different systems. But with generic
ram I was able to run rock-solid. Of course, you will suffer a penalty for
using the DDR stuff when it comes to performance, but this board is perfect
for someone who wants to take advantage of a great combination of upgrade
avenues at a trade-off for cutting-edge performance. It also blew away my
previous setup of an Asus Nforce2 board and an Athlon XP3200+ when it came
to file encoding.


"chrisv" <chrisv (AT) nospam (DOT) invalid> wrote

Crud... Sorry for the previous top post.

"DK" <dk (AT) no (DOT) email.thankstospam.net> wrote

Fair enough, but you still haven't told us what these files are and what you
are trying to do with them. I can open hundreds of photos and my memory
usage doesn't go up dramatically, but as I said, as soon as I start to work
with the photos, the memory usage rockets due to the undo buffer in the
application.

Try this. With a fresh boot of windows, open one of your 50MB files, then
modify it, change it again, copy and paste something on it, then change
something else, build / convert / compress / process (don't know what your
application is!) and see what happens to your memory usage. Just opening a
file won't necessarily use lots of memory, but working with it probably
will. But I repeat - this depends on the software and what you are doing!

I was just answering your point about the need for loads of RAM in a PC. I
have 1.5GB and have the swap file turned off for maximum performance. I can
fill this amount of RAM when processing photos (lots of), so have to be
careful. This is the only application I have that uses major amounts of RAM,
but there are other apps that use loads of RAM - modern games for example
will tend to use as much as they can get their digital hands on.

Sleepy wrote:


[snip]

I totally agree and nearly posted the same thing. I live in New Zealand, it
gets plenty hot in summer yet I've safely run an XP1800+ (T'bredB) at 2.2GHz
and 1.775V vcore without the temp going over 65°C under full load on the
hottest day.

Then again, I'm not totally ignorant about CPU/case cooling.
--
Shaun.