If you had the choice between:

- 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 1 X 4 GB
- 8 GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 2 X 4GB ( + $49.00 )

Is it worth the extra money or is the increase in performance not worth mentioning? Any experience with that.

The processor

4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4700MQ Processor ( 2.4 GHz 6MB L3 Cache - 4 Cores plus Hyperthreading )

Thanks.

On Tuesday, 3 September 2013 at 16:15:51 UTC, Chris wrote:
> If you had the choice between:
>
> - 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 1 X 4 GB
> - 8 GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 2 X 4GB ( + $49.00 )
>
> Is it worth the extra money or is the increase in performance not worth mentioning? Any experience with that.
>
> The processor
>
> 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4700MQ Processor ( 2.4 GHz 6MB L3 Cache - 4 Cores plus Hyperthreading )
>
> Thanks.

That's a little pricey for a 4GB DIMM, but the prospect of living with less than 8GB is unfathomable with my usage habits.  Do you run a lot of things?  Do you use browser tabs?  Do you compile code?  If the answer to any of these is "yes", more memory will probably help.  If nothing else, you benefit from OS caching to memory and not swapping.  That's a nice thing to have.

-Wyatt

03-Sep-2013 21:48, Wyatt пишет:
> On Tuesday, 3 September 2013 at 16:15:51 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> If you had the choice between:
>>
>> - 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 1 X 4 GB
>> - 8 GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 2 X 4GB ( + $49.00 )
>>
>> Is it worth the extra money or is the increase in performance not
>> worth mentioning? Any experience with that.
>>
>> The processor
>>
>> 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4700MQ Processor ( 2.4 GHz 6MB L3 Cache
>> - 4 Cores plus Hyperthreading )
>>
>> Thanks.
>
> That's a little pricey for a 4GB DIMM, but the prospect of living with
> less than 8GB is unfathomable with my usage habits.  Do you run a lot of
> things?  Do you use browser tabs?  Do you compile code?  If the answer
> to any of these is "yes", more memory will probably help.

+1

The more the better. Esp with i7 it should be a nobrainer, BTW doesn't i7 have 3-channel memory controller? I then would go 3x4Gb, maybe cheaper ram.

> If nothing
> else, you benefit from OS caching to memory and not swapping.  That's a
> nice thing to have.
>
> -Wyatt


-- 
Dmitry Olshansky

> The more the better. Esp with i7 it should be a nobrainer, BTW doesn't i7 have 3-channel memory controller? I then would go 3x4Gb, maybe cheaper ram.

AFAIK that was just the Nehalem core i7.

On Tuesday, 3 September 2013 at 16:15:51 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Is it worth the extra money or is the increase in performance not worth mentioning?

It won't do *squat* to your performance. However, what it *will* do is allow you to do twice as many things at the same time, before you start swapping (at which case performance goes down. A lot.) That said, if you can afford it, it's nice breathing room (especially for windows).

> + $49.00

For $55.00 you can buy the whole 8 gigs, You can easily get 4 gigs for 30$. If your merchant is billing you 50$ for an extra 4 gigs, don't take it, and buy them yourself on some other retailer.

As long as we are off-topic: Make sure you get an SSD. I would not consider buying a computer without one today. I dare say that today, it is *the* most important thing to have in a computer.

Today, if your computer has an SSD, and at least the 4 gigs of memory, then it is basically fast enough to do mostly anything that's not 3D, or massive number grinding. It will allow flying through files, coding, surfing with tons of tabs etc...

I'm on an "punny" i3U laptop, with integrated graphics, but there's an 256G SSD. Truth be told, unless I'm playing video games, I can't see any difference in terms of performance compared to my desktop.

On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 20:58:32 +0200
"monarch_dodra" <monarchdodra@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Today, if your computer has an SSD, and at least the 4 gigs of memory, then it is basically fast enough to do mostly anything that's not 3D, or massive number grinding. It will allow flying through files, coding, surfing with tons of tabs etc...
> 

I'm on a 4GB machine with no SSD (and much less than i7, only a
mobile 2-core) and I find it to be plenty fast for anything non-3D. Not
saying that an SSD (and i7) wouldn't be even better (and much hotter in
the case of i7), I'm sure SSD et al would be a noticeable improvement,
but FWIW I haven't had performance problems.

But I tend to avoid resource-hogging programs, so YMMV.

[1] My brother has an i7 Macbook - you could almost cook food on the underside of that thing!

On Tue, Sep 03, 2013 at 04:29:30PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 20:58:32 +0200
> "monarch_dodra" <monarchdodra@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Today, if your computer has an SSD, and at least the 4 gigs of memory, then it is basically fast enough to do mostly anything that's not 3D, or massive number grinding. It will allow flying through files, coding, surfing with tons of tabs etc...
> > 
> 
> I'm on a 4GB machine with no SSD (and much less than i7, only a mobile 2-core) and I find it to be plenty fast for anything non-3D. Not saying that an SSD (and i7) wouldn't be even better (and much hotter in the case of i7), I'm sure SSD et al would be a noticeable improvement, but FWIW I haven't had performance problems.
> 
> But I tend to avoid resource-hogging programs, so YMMV.
> 
> [1] My brother has an i7 Macbook - you could almost cook food on the underside of that thing!

Perfect, so one could browse the latest dmd git commits while boiling an egg for breakfast (under the computer). Just the thing for D enthusiasts. :-P


T

-- 
Famous last words: I *think* this will work...

On Tuesday, 3 September 2013 at 16:15:51 UTC, Chris wrote:
> If you had the choice between:
>
> - 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 1 X 4 GB
> - 8 GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 2 X 4GB ( + $49.00 )
>
> Is it worth the extra money or is the increase in performance not worth mentioning? Any experience with that.
>
> The processor
>
> 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4700MQ Processor ( 2.4 GHz 6MB L3 Cache - 4 Cores plus Hyperthreading )
>
> Thanks.

That very much depends on your usage scenario. My rather old (T500, 2*2,8 GHz, 4GB, normal hard disk) notebook still feels perfectly fine even for the occasional movie.

For Windoze I don't know but for linux and FreeBSD a 4GB dual core system is absolutely OK and that includes software development even with IDE unless you use Eclipse. Unless you want to compile linux or gcc or the like frequently a Core7 is actually overkill/luxury.

Generally speaking though, you might want to always have 2 (equal size) RAMs rather than 1.
As for SSDs, I have one on my main system and it's nice but frankly, with linux buffering and enough RAM the difference usually isn't that noticeable.

A+ -R

On Tuesday, 3 September 2013 at 17:48:22 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> On Tuesday, 3 September 2013 at 16:15:51 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> If you had the choice between:
>>
>> - 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 1 X 4 GB
>> - 8 GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 2 X 4GB ( + $49.00 )
>>
>> Is it worth the extra money or is the increase in performance not worth mentioning? Any experience with that.
>>
>> The processor
>>
>> 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4700MQ Processor ( 2.4 GHz 6MB L3 Cache - 4 Cores plus Hyperthreading )
>>
>> Thanks.
>
> That's a little pricey for a 4GB DIMM, but the prospect of living with less than 8GB is unfathomable with my usage habits.
>  Do you run a lot of things?  Do you use browser tabs?  Do you compile code?  If the answer to any of these is "yes", more memory will probably help.  If nothing else, you benefit from OS caching to memory and not swapping.  That's a nice thing to have.
>
> -Wyatt

Thanks to all for the replies. Yeah, the answer is "Yes". It's the whole shebang: Youtube + compiling + surfing with tabs, image editing, recording and editing music, watching DVDs etc etc.

The machine I was looking at is this one:

https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/gazp9#

If you go to "Configure & Buy" you will see that the original price soon skyrockets, if you configure it a bit e.g.

16 GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 2 X 8 GB ( + $139.00 )
240 GB Intel 530 Series Solid State Drive ( + $249.00 )
[...]

I would also have to pay $130 shipping + 23% VAT on top of that. Unfortunately it's the same story with every brand. I have looked at many brands now and they all have the same pricing policy. Cheap at first sight but then it goes up and up, if you want better specs. This one is at least a pure Ubuntu machine (no Windows fees) and other brands often get bad reviews (plus they are not really cheaper and might have issues with Ubuntu).

Maybe I could buy the memory myself at a later stage, if I notice any performance hits.

As regards the SSD, it's still a lot of money. Are those hybrids any good? Performance wise? E.g.:

750 GB 7200 RPM SATA III Hybrid Hard Drive with 8 GB SSD ( + $109.00 )

On Tuesday, 3 September 2013 at 21:10:17 UTC, Chris wrote:
> As regards the SSD, it's still a lot of money. Are those hybrids any good? Performance wise? E.g.:

Theoretically yes. Practically probably not that much for most typical workloads.

Looking at your scenario: The best performance/price ratio for you is quite doubtlessly RAM.

8 GB should do fine. With some VMs and lots of browsing and possibly movie transcoding you might want to even consider 16GB.