Could I get any opinions whether it makes any difference in my new computer(being built as we speak), if it has 32 or 64 Gigabyte of memory?

---

For what purpose do you need *that* amount of memory? Should this be a web- or big database server? Then the more, the better? 16GB are more than enough, for "normal" purposes even 8GB are absolutely sufficient. So i would say, there is no difference in using 32 or 64GB. ;)

---

Aloha, Uli

Unless you will going to work with extreamely big DB, making movies, CAD, etc. something that realy needs all the memory you could suply, 8 Gb most be enought.

---

Thank you for the rapid responses. I would doing normal things, no movie or storing large data bases. But, want to crunch Boinc Projects as fast as I can.

---

I would doing normal things, no movie or storing large data bases. But, want to crunch Boinc Projects as fast as I can.

Than you should check the RAM requirements of the projects you run and buy as much as they + the system + the applications you run need, so that you don't need to have a pagefile turned on.

For example a good rule of a thumb from Rosetta, which is quite RAM hungry, is 1GB per core + 2-4GB for everything else, depending if it's dedicated cruncher or not.

---

Thank you Link.

---

I think my new computer will be a (TM)i7-4960 with 3.6 GHz 6 processors and two GTX780ti cards.

---

Could I get any opinions whether it makes any difference in my new computer(being built as we speak), if it has 32 or 64 Gigabyte of memory?

Are you actually asking about memory, or 32bit vs 64bit OS?

If you want to build a RAM drive the more RAM the better. If you want to run DDR3 1866Mhz don't go over 32 GB or it reverts to 1600Mhz. If you are going to overclock it is best to buy a "kit" so all sticks will play nice.

---

Thank you for the rapid responses. I would doing normal things, no movie or storing large data bases. But, want to crunch Boinc Projects as fast as I can.

As Juan intimates, even 32 GB would be massive overkill. Here's a snapshot of my home PC, running 7xCPU WUs and 4x GPU (AP only) WUs (2 each on two GPUs):

top - 00:05:44 up 12 days,  3:17,  9 users,  load average: 10.34, 10.12, 10.15
Tasks: 248 total,  12 running, 236 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.8 us,  3.5 sy, 92.6 ni,  3.1 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   8130840 total,  7299792 used,   831048 free,   312808 buffers
KiB Swap:  5119996 total,     1924 used,  5118072 free,  4697832 cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
21862 ivan      39  19 49748  47m 2040 R  99.8  0.6 167:09.44 astropulse_6.03   
28792 ivan      39  19  106m  38m   12 R  99.8  0.5   2:38.56 setiathome_7.01   
 6079 ivan      39  19 49608  46m 1956 R  99.1  0.6 547:22.29 astropulse_6.01   
24667 ivan      39  19  105m  38m   12 R  98.1  0.5  96:58.04 setiathome_7.01   
24906 ivan      39  19  106m  39m   12 R  95.2  0.5  91:01.28 setiathome_7.01   
22354 ivan      39  19  107m  39m   12 R  91.8  0.5 153:44.96 setiathome_7.01   
27017 ivan      39  19  105m  38m   12 R  91.5  0.5  41:30.63 setiathome_7.01   
26966 ivan      30  10 28.2g  47m  23m R  47.2  0.6  16:04.58 astropulse_6.07   
24380 ivan      30  10 28.3g  90m  64m R  20.0  1.1  11:11.29 astropulse_6.07   
25582 ivan      30  10 28.2g  47m  23m R  14.6  0.6  16:59.37 astropulse_6.07   
22790 ivan      30  10 28.3g  90m  64m R   8.7  1.1  13:58.59 astropulse_6.07 

top says I'm using 7.3 GB, but that includes various caches; the monitoring tool gkrellm says I'm actually only using about 2 GB. You can also discount the virtual memory (VIRT) column for the GPU tasks; there may be that much reserved but it's not actually used or even allocated.
In summary, I'd find it hard to believe that a normal home PC running s@h would ever need more than 16 GB of RAM, and as in my case 8 GB is more than likely to be enough. Any RAM over and above what's needed to keep the tasks in memory is effectively wasted.

---

16GB is all I need on my main rigs (8GB wasn't quite enough for heavy work).

Cheers.

16GB is all I need on my main rigs (8GB wasn't quite enough for heavy work).

Cheers.

Don't you do a lot of video editing? IMO that's not normal home computing.

---

Here's my Ubuntu System. It has a grand total of 2GB of RAM. It's running 3 CPU APs & 2 GPU MB7s.
Top says it's using most of the RAM, However, it's hard to believe all those %MEM adds up to 2GB.
In Fact, most of the RAM us being used for File Caches, it's a *nix thing. According to the System
Monitor, it's really only using about 660MB, or around 33% of Physical RAM. The Swap Used was 0 until
I fired up Firefox. My Windows 8.1 system is similar, it rarely goes above 50% of it's 2GB of RAM.

top - 21:09:03 up 11 days, 14:12,  2 users,  load average: 3.42, 3.45, 3.37
Tasks: 183 total,   4 running, 179 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 78.1%us,  1.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 18.4%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  2.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   2021232k total,  1911912k used,   109320k free,   167256k buffers
Swap:  3153912k total,     3336k used,  3150576k free,  1081248k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                    
21192 tbar      20   0 21436  19m 2056 R  100  1.0  88:42.22 ap_6.01r546_sse                            
21224 tbar      20   0 21512  19m 2060 R   99  1.0  51:57.32 ap_6.01r546_sse                            
21077 tbar      20   0 21512  19m 2056 R   94  1.0 208:46.75 ap_6.01r546_sse                            
21351 tbar      20   0  167m  71m  19m S   12  3.6   0:29.47 setiathome_x41g                            
21287 tbar      20   0  222m  85m  19m S   11  4.3   1:58.96 setiathome_x41g                            
 1148 root      20   0  161m  57m  25m S    6  2.9 752:31.05 Xorg                                       
20707 tbar      20   0  323m  31m  17m S    4  1.6  20:45.78 boincmgr                                   
 1330 tbar      20   0  305m  64m  25m S    1  3.3  82:08.22 compiz                                     
20715 tbar      20   0  112m  13m 6108 S    1  0.7   1:25.81 boinc                                      
21326 tbar      20   0  208m  15m  10m S    1  0.8   0:01.45 gnome-terminal                             
21347 tbar      20   0 19240 1480 1060 R    0  0.1   0:00.51 top                                        
    1 root      20   0 23804 1848 1252 S    0  0.1   0:00.84 init                                       
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 kthreadd                                   
    3 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 migration/0                                
    4 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:20.93 ksoftirqd/0                                
    5 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.03 watchdog/0                                 
    6 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 migration/1

16GB is all I need on my main rigs (8GB wasn't quite enough for heavy work).

Cheers.

Don't you do a lot of video editing? IMO that's not normal home computing.

True I do do a bit now and again, but as a fair bit of that work is shared over the video memory as well these days so I usually have 4-6GB to spare on the system memory depending on the quality being worked on.

In just normal everyday stuff I would rarely use 4GB of that, but in either case 32GB or 64GB IMO would just be a waste of money if your not going to use it.

Cheers.

From what little I know I agree.

---