Memory vs CPU Horsepower
Posted: Mon May 26, 2003 11:02 pm
Memory vs CPU Horsepower
Reads like the title for one of those endless discussions that never seem to be solved.
Going through the pictures I took of the Hut Saturday and putting some of them into my favorite wordprocessor I remember a conversation I had with another forumite last week on memory making the machine faster, and I said not really, but yes really and only to a certain extent under some circumstances.
The machine I use is a fast machine but it was still becoming sluggish processing through those pictures, several hundred of them and some as large as over 2 megs apiece.
Task manager to the rescue. A quick click on the performance tab revealed that the machine was only consuming about 170 megs of ram at best and the real bottleneck came as no surprise, the CPU Usage History real-time graph was indicating that the CPU usage was pegged at 100% for most of that duration, hence the slowdown was in the fast CPU rather than in the memory.
500 megs of RAM is optimum for most usages except for the heavy gaming addict. The remainder of it loafs along wasted most, if not all the time, plus wastes the money you may have spent to reach new heights with your PC.
Reads like the title for one of those endless discussions that never seem to be solved.
Going through the pictures I took of the Hut Saturday and putting some of them into my favorite wordprocessor I remember a conversation I had with another forumite last week on memory making the machine faster, and I said not really, but yes really and only to a certain extent under some circumstances.
The machine I use is a fast machine but it was still becoming sluggish processing through those pictures, several hundred of them and some as large as over 2 megs apiece.
Task manager to the rescue. A quick click on the performance tab revealed that the machine was only consuming about 170 megs of ram at best and the real bottleneck came as no surprise, the CPU Usage History real-time graph was indicating that the CPU usage was pegged at 100% for most of that duration, hence the slowdown was in the fast CPU rather than in the memory.
500 megs of RAM is optimum for most usages except for the heavy gaming addict. The remainder of it loafs along wasted most, if not all the time, plus wastes the money you may have spent to reach new heights with your PC.