If I wanted I could go to 8 GB to 16 GB of DDR3 ram but not sure if I should? What do you all think ? Doing it mainly for the heck of it but still want to do it. Is there any serious benefits of maxing out my motherboard ? I know I could use some of it for a ramdrive and it is good for VMs.
max2, perhaps the greatest benefit is that DDR3 DRAM Pricing is Lower than Ever so now it's the time to upgrade, if you wish to do so. Additional RAM allows you to have more programs open at the same time, especially if they are memory intensive. Also, if your motherboard has an integrated graphics card, it will benefit from the increased RAM, allowing you to play more games.
I agree with JR when I ordered my laptop it came with 8GB and for an extra $50 I got 16GB DDR3! I use that much when I have 3 or 4 VM`s running at the same time! TH
Having a VM able to take advantage of 4GB or even 8GB is really nice because it'll lower how much you're using your disk. Chances are that you will not see a difference in "every day" average operations moving from 8GB to 16GB. Only when using particularly RAM intensive tasks. Go to your task manager, performance, launch resource monitor, and see how much of your RAM is "Free" and how much is "Standby" - if you have a significant amount of Standby you likely won't see much difference from the upgrade outside of very specific tasks (photoshop, VMs, etc)
Great Intel® Core™ i7-840QM Processor with 16GB of 1333Mhz DDR3 memory! Also I use 2 Mushkin Enhanced Callisto Deluxe MKNSSDCL240GB-DX 2.5" 240GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) drives 1 for the OS and Programs and the other for Data with VM's! TH
Having a separate hard drive for your VMs is a great way to speed them up. Quad core is also going to make a big difference.
Yes it does very much that's why I forked out $$$$ to get 2 240GB SSD's as the Hard Drive is the True Bottleneck! TH
XP vms perhaps. Not being able to give my PC full GPU acceleration is a pain... Windows 7 takes a big hit by only being able to access a small portion of vram.
No reason not to at current prices. I just built a new machine about a month ago and went 16GB. Works well for VMs as stated. I mostly run Linux in VMs though so not a lot of resources required to begin with. It's also great for gaming but I probably actually could have gotten away with 8GB. If you have a case windows it looks nice to have all of the slots full.
It's really nice being able to have 2 VM's open at the same time for side by side comparisons or hosting on one and testing on the other. Right now if I do that I can only give them 2-3GB each. I'd love to be able to give them both 6GB.
I have XP, Vista and Win7 all 32bit ATM and I use it to help check issues that Prevx or WSA users are having and also to test malware! TH
I work for a software company and it is nice to be able to test our products on all supported Windows versions and if a bug is found it is nice to be able to leave that OS running to compare on another. The Linux VMs are good for networking and network testing as it is more reliable than Windows, even when run on Windows as a guest OS.
They also need less memory. I've had eight Ubuntu 10.10 desktop VMs (512KB each) and three pfSense VMs (256KB each) running on an old Intel quad core box with 8GB memory.
