Skip to main content

memory - Performance related to ram speed



My question is: why overclocking the RAMs does not bring a significant performance increasing? If I speed up their frequency and/or their latency, I will not get big advantages. I can't understand it, considering that the CPU should be able to read and write faster as well as processing data. Or maybe the bottleneck is getting smaller because of faster CPUs? Please give me as much information as you can.


Regards.



Answer



Because in most general-purpose cases, RAM speed is not the bottleneck for a system. What difference is a few nano seconds going to make when it takes more than six million nanoseconds to pull the data off of the harddrive in the first place?


This is one of the reasons I stopped doing manual overclocks on much of my hardware. It simply doesn't make enough of a difference where it matters. Hopping into the BIOS for a few seconds and telling my motherboard to boost the CPU frequency by 30%? Alright, that's noticeable. Spending hours and hours of repeated restarts and stress testing to push an extra 20-100Mhz out of the CPU, PCIe, and RAM? That's just not worth it for me. I'm never going to notice the difference, not when the only thing I really spend waiting on these days are for webpages and other files to download over the Internet, or loading files off of my harddisk.


Reading/writing to disk is one of the largest bottlenecks in most systems, and also one of the most easily fixed, and this is why SSDs are so nice. Loading a TF2 level? 30+ seconds on my platter disk. Overclocking my memory and loading a TF2 level? Still 30+ seconds on my platter disk. Move the TF2 install to my SSD? Less 5 seconds easy to load it.


Unless you're doing work or have applications that specifically transfer large amounts of data back and forth in memory, and that is going to be maxing out the memory bandwidth for days and days and days on end (like server farm animation rendering, commercial data processing facilities, academic and scientific data processing), then there's simply not enough of a difference in the output for boosting your RAM by overclocking to make a significant, noticeable impact.



Doubling the amount of RAM you have on the other hand...


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

How do I transmit a single hexadecimal value serial data in PuTTY using an Alt code?

I am trying to sent a specific hexadecimal value across a serial COM port using PuTTY. Specifically, I want to send the hex codes 9C, B6, FC, and 8B. I have looked up the Alt codes for these and they are 156, 182, 252, and 139 respectively. However, whenever I input the Alt codes, a preceding hex value of C2 is sent before 9C, B6, and 8B so the values that are sent are C2 9C, C2 B6, and C2 8B. The value for FC is changed to C3 FC. Why are these values being placed before the hex value and why is FC being changed altogether? To me, it seems like there is a problem internally converting the Alt code to hex. Is there a way to directly input hex values without using Alt codes in PuTTY? Answer What you're seeing is just ordinary text character set conversion. As far as PuTTY is concerned, you are typing (and reading) text , not raw binary data, therefore it has to convert the text to bytes in whatever configured character set before sending it over the wire. In other words, when y...
Post a Comment
Read more

linux - Extract/save a mail attachment using bash

Using normal bash tools (ie, built-ins or commonly-available command-line tools), is it possible, and how to extract/save attachments on emails? For example, say I have a nightly report which arrives via email but is a zip archive of several log files. I want to save all those zips into a backup directory. How would I accomplish that? Answer If you're aiming for portability, beware that there are several different versions of mail(1) and mailx(1) . There's a POSIX mailx command, but with very few requirements. And none of the implementations I have seem to parse attachments anyway. You might have the mpack package . Its munpack command saves all parts of a MIME message into separate files, then all you have to do is save the interesting parts and clean up the rest. There's also metamail . An equivalent of munpack is metamail -wy .
Post a Comment
Read more

Desktop reboots itself on sleep or hibernate

I have been using an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard for main home desktop workstation, operating Windows Vista x64. This computer has right from day one not been able to enter hibernate or standby; after Windows performs its final actions and brings the machine down, it would automatically revive itself for a reboot. Updating to the second latest BIOS (1201)has not helped (the latest BIOS revision would induce video refresh problems rendering it unusable). I have been reading related discussions on incidents similar to mine to no avail of a true workable solution. They appear to be more speculative guesses rather than actual knowledge on the inner workings of motherboard hardware. Does anybody have any electronic engineering experience on PC energy-saving standards to provide a more informed opinion how to go about getting this to work? More stories: this motherboard could not even reboot properly the first thing i used it. It was due to refresh rate of the onboard GPU, which had no influe...
Post a Comment
Read more

keyboard - Is there any utility/method to change Windows key bindings to type rare chars to currently empty bindings?

I'm currently typing this post with my windows XP machine and (Spanish) keyboard, and I'd like to add some extra symbols to my text. I could open the "char map" windows utility, look for the desired symbols, and paste them. But I'd like something quickier. For example, when I'm using my OSX Mac at work, I can easily add a ©, ™, ® or similar symbols, just pressing some weird ALT-GR + G / H / J, key combinations. In my (Spanish) keyboard mapping, these combinations are empty, as they don't produce any char at all, which, on the other hand, is perfectly normal and desirable. So, I thought: Why couldn't I add some extra key mappings on top of my currently empty ALT-GR + G/J/H Keys in my Spanish keyboard, and thus, being able to quickly type these special symbols? So that's my question: Is there any utility/method to achieve that effect under windows? (My version is XP). I've even googled this for some time but no luck. I've been a long term Hot...
Post a Comment
Read more