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[Liam Proven]

On 2 January 2016 at 00:00, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> You have your opinions on the benefits of more RAM. My main point is
> just that more RAM is the "simplest, cheapest and easiest way to improve
> the performance of almost any personal computer".


It's not my opinion. It's not an opinion at all, in fact.

Personally, my source is Custom PC magazine in the UK, to which I have
a free subscription as I used to write their "Inside Linux" column.
(It's an indirect offshoot of PC Pro, which is the mag I used to be on
the staff of.)

They do exhaustive performance testing, more so than most magazines,
because the mag is aimed at overclockers and customisers, who are
*fanatical* about performance.

And they say that currently the sweet spot is 8GB.

Yes, there was a time when "slam in the RAM" was the answer to
performance problems. That time, however, is long gone.

At other times, it was "switch to a faster CPU" or "add a graphics
accelerator" or "get an Intel Triton motherboard" or "install
busmastering IDE drivers" or "switch to EDO RAM" or "ensure you have a
100MHz front-side bus" or... well, there have been many, over the
years.

There have been many computer performance bottlenecks over the
decades. RAM was one for a long long time. In the late 1990s, some
people hit a different bottleneck pertaining to RAM -- if you ran
Win9x, then more than about 128MB would not help you as the OS
couldn't use it. Then the market moved to NT and that went away.

Then, for over a decade, "add more RAM" was the mantra, and it was true.

But today, if you have 4-8GB RAM, the simplest, quickest, easiest and
*by far* the most effective way to improve general overall PC
performance for a typical mass-market computer is to install an SSD
and put the OS on that.

Unless the user is a specialist with extreme performance requirements,
>8GB of RAM will make no difference at all.

The "add more RAM" rule no longer holds, any more than my entirely
correct guidance about hard disk partitioning in the mid-1990s does.
It *was* correct then. It is not correct any more.

Hard disk space is not a problem for most people any more, either.
Terabytes are cheap now and most people don't need terabytes of space.
So long as you buy a real, non-crippled, CPU -- not a Celeron or Atom
or whatever -- then CPU power isn't a bottleneck any more either. 2 of
my computers run Core 2 Duos, a ~8 year old chip; their performance is
perfectly good.

Cheap on-CPU-die GPUs are perfectly good for most users now, too,
except demanding gamers.

Now, the SSD is the one component that makes the most difference.

Your comments were perfectly correct even 4-5y ago, but not any more.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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