RAM upgrade?

Morph3ous

Morph3ous

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I built my PC just over a year ago with the following spec:

Intel i5 2500K
8GB 1333mhz RAM
60GB SSD for OS and main apps
No graphics card
other HDD for storage/backup
Win 7 64bit

The RAM I bought has since halved in price, and is now available for £38. Would I see a significant performance increase by adding another 8GB RAM to my system?

Right now I'm using Google Chrome to browse, LR4, CS6 Beta (usually CS5) and Spotify. My Resource Monitor says I'm using 4GB of RAM with 4GB on standby. This suggests to me I wouldn't need another 8GB, as only 4GB is being used...or is it not that simple? Is it more a percentage of available memory thing, rather than 'x' program needs 'x' amount of memory?

Advice appreciated.
 
Would CS5 make use of a dedicated graphics card? a lot more money of course.
 
The best thing would be to bring up the task manager and see how much free memory you have. 8gb is quite a lot but if you ave lots of images open at once or create large panoramas then you could get more.

Getting a separate video card will speed up the computer a bit anyway. Currently it is having to read the computer memory constantly to generate the picture for the monitor. Getting an additional card will separate this. It's only worth getting a cheaper card though.
I haven't used cs5 but go through the settings to see if there are any options relating to CUDA which is the system where a program can offload some processing onto the video card. It's often used for video compression and given how quick it is to process a single picture I doubt it's supported.
 
Steep said:
Would CS5 make use of a dedicated graphics card?
Click to expand...

only for rendering the images, wont have any effect on processing speed. but as said above having a dedicated card would free up the memory the onboard graphics have taken.

remember windows 7 will use spare memory as a cache so potentially having more may speed things up.

also you can run a much much smaller page file without running the gauntlet of disabling completely.

that said, if youre not using most of the 8gb there isnt much point. although you could get it to futureproof yourself.

otherwise the i5-2500k and an SSD youve already got which are key factors. in my opinion.
 
Thanks for the replies.

Steep said:
Would CS5 make use of a dedicated graphics card? a lot more money of course.
Click to expand...

Graphics card isn't an option. When planning the build I found the 2500K was performing similar to an HD5450 graphics card on tests. This was the type of graphics card I was looking at (cheap), simply because it would help with rendering as I don't play games on the PC. I therefore decided it was better to go with the i5 2500K rather than an i3 and graphics card as I'd make more use of the i5 processing power. I put in an H67 type board so I can't make use of a graphics card now without losing the integrated graphics, meaning I'll be spending a fair amount to bring it over and above what I've got now.
 
What performance increase are you after? Quicker Photoshop processing? Quicker app boot?

IMHO, the best way of improving your system would be to swap the motherboard for one based on a Z68 chipset with integrated graphics out, and possibly buy an after market cooler for the processor. That way you could overclock the 2500K (you might get 20% more), whilst still having the integrated graphics.

If it's app boot times, SSDs are not all equal!
 
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