I'm a computer nerd from way back, I'm seeing all of these newer multi-core processors coming out on the market and they are saying anywhere from 2 cores at 1.77 all the way up to 4 @ 2.33 or higher. Now here's my question, are these ghz ratings the total power of all the cores or is this basically 4 processors that all clock 2.33 each? what does it mean for me in terms of minimum system requirements for a video game?
Clock speed is the number of times the circuit "cycles" in a second. So a 2.5Ghz processor cycles 2500,000,000 times a second. This isn't really related to performance at all. (then you want to look at instructions per clock cycle as well)
Each core in a modern Processor is essentially a separate Processor, just stuck in the same chip. If you have a quad (4) core processor running at 2.5Ghz, each one of those cores is running at 2.5Ghz.
Remember that software threads (lists of code the computer works though) can't be split between cores. So if you have a program that is just one thread, one core is going to be working like mad while the other three sit around with their thumbs up their asses. Usually, the OS distributes threads evenly to all cores so they are all working as hard as each other.
You were never a computer nerd. Or at least, you were a bad one. Amiga 4 Lyfe bitches, get that fagass 386 outa here before I drop justice on you wi' a quickness.
so in the event I'm using a 4 year old dell with a dual 1.77ghz clock speed and the program requires 2.0ghz to run the program is a no go? Or are most modern programs multiple-thread to utilize the multi-core processors that have become the standard?
I find "requirements" to be misleading and dumb, or, a base guideline for performance.
As long as you're running it on the same OS and same architecture there is no real requirements short of a memory limit. It'll run unless the program relies on something. That's why a game that says "Requires a Pentium 3.2 GHz processor" runs fine on AMD, or, the new cores that are obviously below 3.2 GHz.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
If you get two similar CPUs (i.e. 2 Core2Duos), the one with more Jigahearts is faster.
If you get two similar CPUs with a different number of cores and the same Jigahearts per core (i.e a Core2Duo and a Core2Quad), the one with more cores MIGHT be faster, depending on the game (GTAIV, ARMA2, SupCom)
Old Single Cores with LOTSA jijgahearts are slower than modern CPUs with fewer Jigahearts and a lot of cores (i.e. Pentium 4 and Core2Duo).
Newer CPUs are faster with the same number of cores and the same jigahearts, Core2Duo and Core i3.
It's good to have something faster than 3GHz per core, in practice.
so in the event I'm using a 4 year old dell with a dual 1.77ghz clock speed and the program requires 2.0ghz to run the program is a no go? Or are most modern programs multiple-thread to utilize the multi-core processors that have become the standard?
Whoever wrote those system requirements is a bad person.
GHz means diddly-shit because different chips execute different amounts of instructions per clock cycle. A 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 will be handily outperformed by (one of the cores on a) 1.6 GHz Core i5.
Daedalus on
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
Gigahertz is a meaningless CPU measure these days. An AMD Phenom and Intel Core i CPU might run at the same core clock, but have completely different real world performance. Gigahertz can really only be used to measure processors from the exact same product line against each other. Even a Core i5 running at 2.83ghz may be slower than a Core i7 running at 2.83ghz.
To the OP, each core basically represents a single thread of simultaneous execution on your machine (with the Core i series it may actually represent two, but ignore that for now, as it's confusing). So if you have a quad core CPU, your system can run four threads of execution at exactly the same time. Some games take advantage of this, others do not. It's basically symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) without actually having multiple chips plugged in to your motherboard.
e: Beated by Daedalus on the "Gigahertz is meaningless" point.
Pretty much now, at least within the Intel chips, you can still easily finger out which is faster by looking 3 numbers: the model and then the hertz, then the cores.
Pretty much now, at least within the Intel chips, you can still easily finger out which is faster by looking 3 numbers: the model and then the hertz, then the cores.
You most likely won't need more than 2 cores.
The model number tells you all that information anyway :P.
Here's the general guide for desktop CPUs (mobile CPUs are just weird):
Intel:
Celeron/Pentium: Same as i3, but with less cache. Generally avoided unless you seriously have no money (in which case you should be getting AMD anyway...)
Core i3: Dual core without Turbo Boost (aka the CPU is capable of overclocking itself during single-thread loads).
Core i5: Dual (6xx) or Quad (7xx) core with Turbo Boost, but no Hyper-Threading.
Core i7: Quad (or Hexa (970 models and higher)) core with Hyper-Threading.
Within a given series, the higher numbers will always be faster. Like was said earlier, clock speed is essentially meaningless now. The slowest Core i3 is about twice as fast as the fastest ever Pentium 4, even though its clock speed is 500 MHz slower.
AMD :
Athlon II X2/X3/X4 xxx: In general, the Athlon II line is just a Phenom II without L3 cache. Very good for a cheap CPU. The X2/X3/X4 tells you the number of cores.
Phenom II X2/X3/X4/X6 xxx: Same as above. Not much to say beyond that.
In general, AMD and Intel know how all of their CPUs perform relative to each other and they are priced accordingly. If you see a given AMD CPU and a given Intel CPU for the same price, you can figure they perform roughly the same. AMD will usually give you more cores for the money, but the Intel CPUs generally have better performance per core so the choice comes down to your typical workload.
OP: Like other people said, system requirements are usually more "guidelines" than rules. Certain things are typically hard rules, like what level of DirectX your video card supports, amount of RAM, amount of HD space, and number of cores (the vast majority of games still don't "require" dual-core, though), but the listed clock speed isn't one of those.
Good thread. Can someone make this crystal clear. Individual programs MUST be coded to work with multiple processors or not?
To get a performance boost, yes. To run at all, no.
Also, even if the program in question is single-threaded, a multicore chip will still help if you're running more than one program at once, which is pretty much all the time.
Good thread. Can someone make this crystal clear. Individual programs MUST be coded to work with multiple processors or not?
To get a performance boost, yes. To run at all, no.
Also, even if the program in question is single-threaded, a multicore chip will still help if you're running more than one program at once, which is pretty much all the time.
Yep. This is one the chief reasons I tell people that Vista/7 is better than XP - they (especially 7) are much better at handling many-core environments than XP.
Good thread. Can someone make this crystal clear. Individual programs MUST be coded to work with multiple processors or not?
To get a performance boost, yes. To run at all, no.
Also, even if the program in question is single-threaded, a multicore chip will still help if you're running more than one program at once, which is pretty much all the time.
Yep. This is one the chief reasons I tell people that Vista/7 is better than XP - they (especially 7) are much better at handling many-core environments than XP.
Ah I think I see now. So then the problem comes if you're playing a game with a Core 2 Duo and the game isn't written to support multicores then the game won't be utilizing both chips at the same time to run the game, because it doesn't know how?
Good thread. Can someone make this crystal clear. Individual programs MUST be coded to work with multiple processors or not?
To get a performance boost, yes. To run at all, no.
Also, even if the program in question is single-threaded, a multicore chip will still help if you're running more than one program at once, which is pretty much all the time.
Yep. This is one the chief reasons I tell people that Vista/7 is better than XP - they (especially 7) are much better at handling many-core environments than XP.
Ah I think I see now. So then the problem comes if you're playing a game with a Core 2 Duo and the game isn't written to support multicores then the game won't be utilizing both chips at the same time to run the game, because it doesn't know how?
Good thread. Can someone make this crystal clear. Individual programs MUST be coded to work with multiple processors or not?
To get a performance boost, yes. To run at all, no.
Also, even if the program in question is single-threaded, a multicore chip will still help if you're running more than one program at once, which is pretty much all the time.
Yep. This is one the chief reasons I tell people that Vista/7 is better than XP - they (especially 7) are much better at handling many-core environments than XP.
Ah I think I see now. So then the problem comes if you're playing a game with a Core 2 Duo and the game isn't written to support multicores then the game won't be utilizing both chips at the same time to run the game, because it doesn't know how?
Correct.
Though in fairness that C2D is probably faster, even utilizing one core, than most single-core chips (which are going to be your P4's and Celerons).
But for this reason a lot of people don't see significant gains when moving to a Quad from a Dual; for a lot of games and apps, you may well get better results from a faster-clocked Core2Duo than a slower-clocked Core2Quad...even though the latter will cost you more.
what is the relationship between multitasking (in terms of effectiveness) of More RAM vs More Cores.
Will doubling your cores equate to doubling your RAM, or is the ratio higher/lower in one direction?
Or do they have some crazy non linear relationship, or one that is impossible to explain?
I guess as a result of the second one, to improve performance, is it better to spend more on RAM or CPU, if you can only do one, and if you can do both, is that better? For example:
You have $70, do you upgrade the RAM only or the CPU?
You have $140, do you upgrade Only one or the other, or split it?
what is the relationship between multitasking (in terms of effectiveness) of More RAM vs More Cores.
Will doubling your cores equate to doubling your RAM, or is the ratio higher/lower in one direction?
Or do they have some crazy non linear relationship, or one that is impossible to explain?
I guess as a result of the second one, to improve performance, is it better to spend more on RAM or CPU, if you can only do one, and if you can do both, is that better? For example:
You have $70, do you upgrade the RAM only or the CPU?
You have $140, do you upgrade Only one or the other, or split it?
RAM isn't about speed, it's about space.
Look, it's like this: for RAM, you need enough to peep your program in memory so it's not constantly going back to the disk for it, because getting information from RAM is about a million times faster than getting it from a hard drive. If you've got more RAM than the program(s) you're running use, it'll just sit there, doing nothing.
what is the relationship between multitasking (in terms of effectiveness) of More RAM vs More Cores.
Will doubling your cores equate to doubling your RAM, or is the ratio higher/lower in one direction?
Or do they have some crazy non linear relationship, or one that is impossible to explain?
I guess as a result of the second one, to improve performance, is it better to spend more on RAM or CPU, if you can only do one, and if you can do both, is that better? For example:
You have $70, do you upgrade the RAM only or the CPU?
You have $140, do you upgrade Only one or the other, or split it?
RAM isn't about speed, it's about space.
Look, it's like this: for RAM, you need enough to peep your program in memory so it's not constantly going back to the disk for it, because getting information from RAM is about a million times faster than getting it from a hard drive. If you've got more RAM than the program(s) you're running use, it'll just sit there, doing nothing.
You're being hella contradictory and i'm too lazy to correct you properly and warn you about confusing people with technicalities, so let's just be clear:
RAM is about speed, but in RAM's case, you get that speed mostly through the addition of space.
However, RAM is about speed through speed, too. It comes in different speeds, and higher speeds cost more money. And once you have enough space, the only way to improve performance is speed.
The answer is basically that there isn't an answer, because some tasks will rely more on RAM and some will rely more on CPU. If you're encoding video you should upgrade your CPU. If you're editing photos and find that having large files open is what kills you, upgrade your RAM. You want enough RAM to handle everything you do, and beyond that you want fast RAM and a fast CPU. 80-90% of the time the answer is "upgrade whichever component is the worst."
You know, I see all these benchmarks and they have weird scenarios set up, but really they should all just test CPU's by compiling Wine. My Q9550 does it in 5 minutes (with 5 jobs), so come on you bastards, show me your i7 can do it way faster!
what is the relationship between multitasking (in terms of effectiveness) of More RAM vs More Cores.
Will doubling your cores equate to doubling your RAM, or is the ratio higher/lower in one direction?
Or do they have some crazy non linear relationship, or one that is impossible to explain?
I guess as a result of the second one, to improve performance, is it better to spend more on RAM or CPU, if you can only do one, and if you can do both, is that better? For example:
You have $70, do you upgrade the RAM only or the CPU?
You have $140, do you upgrade Only one or the other, or split it?
RAM isn't about speed, it's about space.
Look, it's like this: for RAM, you need enough to peep your program in memory so it's not constantly going back to the disk for it, because getting information from RAM is about a million times faster than getting it from a hard drive. If you've got more RAM than the program(s) you're running use, it'll just sit there, doing nothing.
You're being hella contradictory and i'm too lazy to correct you properly and warn you about confusing people with technicalities, so let's just be clear:
RAM is about speed, but in RAM's case, you get that speed mostly through the addition of space.
However, RAM is about speed through speed, too. It comes in different speeds, and higher speeds cost more money. And once you have enough space, the only way to improve performance is speed.
Bah. In 99.9% of cases, you're better off upgrading just about anything else before upgrading RAM speed.
what is the relationship between multitasking (in terms of effectiveness) of More RAM vs More Cores.
Will doubling your cores equate to doubling your RAM, or is the ratio higher/lower in one direction?
Or do they have some crazy non linear relationship, or one that is impossible to explain?
I guess as a result of the second one, to improve performance, is it better to spend more on RAM or CPU, if you can only do one, and if you can do both, is that better? For example:
You have $70, do you upgrade the RAM only or the CPU?
You have $140, do you upgrade Only one or the other, or split it?
RAM isn't about speed, it's about space.
Look, it's like this: for RAM, you need enough to peep your program in memory so it's not constantly going back to the disk for it, because getting information from RAM is about a million times faster than getting it from a hard drive. If you've got more RAM than the program(s) you're running use, it'll just sit there, doing nothing.
You're being hella contradictory and i'm too lazy to correct you properly and warn you about confusing people with technicalities, so let's just be clear:
RAM is about speed, but in RAM's case, you get that speed mostly through the addition of space.
However, RAM is about speed through speed, too. It comes in different speeds, and higher speeds cost more money. And once you have enough space, the only way to improve performance is speed.
Bah. In 99.9% of cases, you're better off upgrading just about anything else before upgrading RAM speed.
None of you managed to answer any of the questions. I understand the relationship between RAM size and speed, my question is specifically on multi tasking: If I'm trying to run two intense programs at the same time, which will improve performance more: increasing my RAM size, to try and cover the required memory allocation of each program, or to have more Cores to try and run the required threads at the same time on separate cores?
I suppose some of you sorta answered that there is no relative relationship, which is I guess an acceptable answer.
None of you managed to answer any of the questions. I understand the relationship between RAM size and speed, my question is specifically on multi tasking: If I'm trying to run two intense programs at the same time, which will improve performance more: increasing my RAM size, to try and cover the required memory allocation of each program, or to have more Cores to try and run the required threads at the same time on separate cores?
I suppose some of you sorta answered that there is no relative relationship, which is I guess an acceptable answer.
Well, the answer is that it depends.
How much RAM are we talking, and what are you running? And what CPU are we starting from?
If your hard drive is constantly thrashing from running out of free RAM, then your first upgrade is almost certainly the RAM. All the cores in the world aren't doing much good if they're sitting idle while you swap from the hard drive.
Basically, RAM is sort of a binary "sufficient" or "not sufficient" thing. If you have "enough," there's really no point upgrading, and you'll get a vastly larger performance boost by going with more/faster cores. However, if you don't have "enough," then it becomes the single most important upgrade in your system. There's really not much of a gradient beyond that, IMO.
So yeah, crazy non-linear relationship, but pretty easy to explain.
mcdermott on
0
Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
None of you managed to answer any of the questions. I understand the relationship between RAM size and speed, my question is specifically on multi tasking: If I'm trying to run two intense programs at the same time, which will improve performance more: increasing my RAM size, to try and cover the required memory allocation of each program, or to have more Cores to try and run the required threads at the same time on separate cores?
I suppose some of you sorta answered that there is no relative relationship, which is I guess an acceptable answer.
Well, the answer is that it depends.
How much RAM are we talking, and what are you running? And what CPU are we starting from?
If your hard drive is constantly thrashing from running out of free RAM, then your first upgrade is almost certainly the RAM. All the cores in the world aren't doing much good if they're sitting idle while you swap from the hard drive.
Basically, RAM is sort of a binary "sufficient" or "not sufficient" thing. If you have "enough," there's really no point upgrading, and you'll get a vastly larger performance boost by going with more/faster cores. However, if you don't have "enough," then it becomes the single most important upgrade in your system. There's really not much of a gradient beyond that, IMO.
So yeah, crazy non-linear relationship, but pretty easy to explain.
tl;dr = Tell the guys in the thread what you've got and what you plan to do with it, and odds are someone will be able to tell you what you should focus on first.
Because there is no hard and fast rule.
Some things need a bunch of RAM, some things need multiple cores chugging away. And some things need both.
None of you managed to answer any of the questions. I understand the relationship between RAM size and speed, my question is specifically on multi tasking: If I'm trying to run two intense programs at the same time, which will improve performance more: increasing my RAM size, to try and cover the required memory allocation of each program, or to have more Cores to try and run the required threads at the same time on separate cores?
I suppose some of you sorta answered that there is no relative relationship, which is I guess an acceptable answer.
Well, the answer is that it depends.
How much RAM are we talking, and what are you running? And what CPU are we starting from?
If your hard drive is constantly thrashing from running out of free RAM, then your first upgrade is almost certainly the RAM. All the cores in the world aren't doing much good if they're sitting idle while you swap from the hard drive.
Basically, RAM is sort of a binary "sufficient" or "not sufficient" thing. If you have "enough," there's really no point upgrading, and you'll get a vastly larger performance boost by going with more/faster cores. However, if you don't have "enough," then it becomes the single most important upgrade in your system. There's really not much of a gradient beyond that, IMO.
So yeah, crazy non-linear relationship, but pretty easy to explain.
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.
None of you managed to answer any of the questions. I understand the relationship between RAM size and speed, my question is specifically on multi tasking: If I'm trying to run two intense programs at the same time, which will improve performance more: increasing my RAM size, to try and cover the required memory allocation of each program, or to have more Cores to try and run the required threads at the same time on separate cores?
I suppose some of you sorta answered that there is no relative relationship, which is I guess an acceptable answer.
Well, the answer is that it depends.
How much RAM are we talking, and what are you running? And what CPU are we starting from?
If your hard drive is constantly thrashing from running out of free RAM, then your first upgrade is almost certainly the RAM. All the cores in the world aren't doing much good if they're sitting idle while you swap from the hard drive.
Basically, RAM is sort of a binary "sufficient" or "not sufficient" thing. If you have "enough," there's really no point upgrading, and you'll get a vastly larger performance boost by going with more/faster cores. However, if you don't have "enough," then it becomes the single most important upgrade in your system. There's really not much of a gradient beyond that, IMO.
So yeah, crazy non-linear relationship, but pretty easy to explain.
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.
Don't overspend for old tech though. If you have some ancient Pentium 4 using DDR RAM it's not worth it upgrading just the ram - you will spend a lot of money for old crap. Better to upgrade CPU/Mobo/RAM all together at that point.
At the moment the largest bottleneck to speed is really a hard drive anyways. So upgraded to a SSD will net you a better increase than plopping another 8 gigs in your machine.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
At the moment the largest bottleneck to speed is really a hard drive anyways. So upgraded to a SSD will net you a better increase than plopping another 8 gigs in your machine.
Posts
Clock speed is the number of times the circuit "cycles" in a second. So a 2.5Ghz processor cycles 2500,000,000 times a second. This isn't really related to performance at all. (then you want to look at instructions per clock cycle as well)
Each core in a modern Processor is essentially a separate Processor, just stuck in the same chip. If you have a quad (4) core processor running at 2.5Ghz, each one of those cores is running at 2.5Ghz.
Remember that software threads (lists of code the computer works though) can't be split between cores. So if you have a program that is just one thread, one core is going to be working like mad while the other three sit around with their thumbs up their asses. Usually, the OS distributes threads evenly to all cores so they are all working as hard as each other.
XBL : lJesse Custerl | MWO: Jesse Custer | Best vid ever. | 2nd best vid ever.
Where is your BLiTTER now bitch? I'll let you look for it, I'm busy multitasking.
As long as you're running it on the same OS and same architecture there is no real requirements short of a memory limit. It'll run unless the program relies on something. That's why a game that says "Requires a Pentium 3.2 GHz processor" runs fine on AMD, or, the new cores that are obviously below 3.2 GHz.
If you get two similar CPUs (i.e. 2 Core2Duos), the one with more Jigahearts is faster.
If you get two similar CPUs with a different number of cores and the same Jigahearts per core (i.e a Core2Duo and a Core2Quad), the one with more cores MIGHT be faster, depending on the game (GTAIV, ARMA2, SupCom)
Old Single Cores with LOTSA jijgahearts are slower than modern CPUs with fewer Jigahearts and a lot of cores (i.e. Pentium 4 and Core2Duo).
Newer CPUs are faster with the same number of cores and the same jigahearts, Core2Duo and Core i3.
It's good to have something faster than 3GHz per core, in practice.
Whoever wrote those system requirements is a bad person.
GHz means diddly-shit because different chips execute different amounts of instructions per clock cycle. A 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 will be handily outperformed by (one of the cores on a) 1.6 GHz Core i5.
To the OP, each core basically represents a single thread of simultaneous execution on your machine (with the Core i series it may actually represent two, but ignore that for now, as it's confusing). So if you have a quad core CPU, your system can run four threads of execution at exactly the same time. Some games take advantage of this, others do not. It's basically symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) without actually having multiple chips plugged in to your motherboard.
e: Beated by Daedalus on the "Gigahertz is meaningless" point.
You most likely won't need more than 2 cores.
The model number tells you all that information anyway :P.
Here's the general guide for desktop CPUs (mobile CPUs are just weird):
Intel:
Celeron/Pentium: Same as i3, but with less cache. Generally avoided unless you seriously have no money (in which case you should be getting AMD anyway...)
Core i3: Dual core without Turbo Boost (aka the CPU is capable of overclocking itself during single-thread loads).
Core i5: Dual (6xx) or Quad (7xx) core with Turbo Boost, but no Hyper-Threading.
Core i7: Quad (or Hexa (970 models and higher)) core with Hyper-Threading.
Within a given series, the higher numbers will always be faster. Like was said earlier, clock speed is essentially meaningless now. The slowest Core i3 is about twice as fast as the fastest ever Pentium 4, even though its clock speed is 500 MHz slower.
AMD :
Athlon II X2/X3/X4 xxx: In general, the Athlon II line is just a Phenom II without L3 cache. Very good for a cheap CPU. The X2/X3/X4 tells you the number of cores.
Phenom II X2/X3/X4/X6 xxx: Same as above. Not much to say beyond that.
In general, AMD and Intel know how all of their CPUs perform relative to each other and they are priced accordingly. If you see a given AMD CPU and a given Intel CPU for the same price, you can figure they perform roughly the same. AMD will usually give you more cores for the money, but the Intel CPUs generally have better performance per core so the choice comes down to your typical workload.
OP: Like other people said, system requirements are usually more "guidelines" than rules. Certain things are typically hard rules, like what level of DirectX your video card supports, amount of RAM, amount of HD space, and number of cores (the vast majority of games still don't "require" dual-core, though), but the listed clock speed isn't one of those.
To get a performance boost, yes. To run at all, no.
Also, even if the program in question is single-threaded, a multicore chip will still help if you're running more than one program at once, which is pretty much all the time.
Yep. This is one the chief reasons I tell people that Vista/7 is better than XP - they (especially 7) are much better at handling many-core environments than XP.
Ah I think I see now. So then the problem comes if you're playing a game with a Core 2 Duo and the game isn't written to support multicores then the game won't be utilizing both chips at the same time to run the game, because it doesn't know how?
Yes.
Correct.
Though in fairness that C2D is probably faster, even utilizing one core, than most single-core chips (which are going to be your P4's and Celerons).
But for this reason a lot of people don't see significant gains when moving to a Quad from a Dual; for a lot of games and apps, you may well get better results from a faster-clocked Core2Duo than a slower-clocked Core2Quad...even though the latter will cost you more.
Will doubling your cores equate to doubling your RAM, or is the ratio higher/lower in one direction?
Or do they have some crazy non linear relationship, or one that is impossible to explain?
I guess as a result of the second one, to improve performance, is it better to spend more on RAM or CPU, if you can only do one, and if you can do both, is that better? For example:
You have $70, do you upgrade the RAM only or the CPU?
You have $140, do you upgrade Only one or the other, or split it?
RAM isn't about speed, it's about space.
Look, it's like this: for RAM, you need enough to peep your program in memory so it's not constantly going back to the disk for it, because getting information from RAM is about a million times faster than getting it from a hard drive. If you've got more RAM than the program(s) you're running use, it'll just sit there, doing nothing.
You're being hella contradictory and i'm too lazy to correct you properly and warn you about confusing people with technicalities, so let's just be clear:
RAM is about speed, but in RAM's case, you get that speed mostly through the addition of space.
However, RAM is about speed through speed, too. It comes in different speeds, and higher speeds cost more money. And once you have enough space, the only way to improve performance is speed.
I'M A TWITTER SHITTER
Ditto.
Bah. In 99.9% of cases, you're better off upgrading just about anything else before upgrading RAM speed.
None of you managed to answer any of the questions. I understand the relationship between RAM size and speed, my question is specifically on multi tasking: If I'm trying to run two intense programs at the same time, which will improve performance more: increasing my RAM size, to try and cover the required memory allocation of each program, or to have more Cores to try and run the required threads at the same time on separate cores?
I suppose some of you sorta answered that there is no relative relationship, which is I guess an acceptable answer.
Well, the answer is that it depends.
How much RAM are we talking, and what are you running? And what CPU are we starting from?
If your hard drive is constantly thrashing from running out of free RAM, then your first upgrade is almost certainly the RAM. All the cores in the world aren't doing much good if they're sitting idle while you swap from the hard drive.
Basically, RAM is sort of a binary "sufficient" or "not sufficient" thing. If you have "enough," there's really no point upgrading, and you'll get a vastly larger performance boost by going with more/faster cores. However, if you don't have "enough," then it becomes the single most important upgrade in your system. There's really not much of a gradient beyond that, IMO.
So yeah, crazy non-linear relationship, but pretty easy to explain.
tl;dr = Tell the guys in the thread what you've got and what you plan to do with it, and odds are someone will be able to tell you what you should focus on first.
Because there is no hard and fast rule.
Some things need a bunch of RAM, some things need multiple cores chugging away. And some things need both.
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.
Don't overspend for old tech though. If you have some ancient Pentium 4 using DDR RAM it's not worth it upgrading just the ram - you will spend a lot of money for old crap. Better to upgrade CPU/Mobo/RAM all together at that point.
Fixed.
Double fixed. You damn punk kids!
:^:
I have an intel i5 in my laptop
when I go to the task manager and look at performance it is showing me 4 CPUs
or at least, four separate cpu usage screens
the i5 is a dual core, correct?
so why am I seeing 4 cpu usage screens?
Uh-oh I accidentally deleted my signature. Uh-oh!!