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how much RAM should i get for my computer so many people ask the question

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and the only answer they can get from the in the no techies and i mean we've

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even done it here before is usually well

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how much are you planning to use get that much which is only useful if

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you know how much your workload requires for gamers it's relatively simple

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there's a number on the back of the box excuse me a digital information page

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because physical media but for content creators and our main

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focus is going to be on adobe creative cloud because that's what we use here

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between adobe's own system requirements and white papers and the numerous

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professionals on the message boards around the web there's no solid answer

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all we really hear is you need multiple fast storage locations more memory is

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good uh faster processors with more cores are good and video cards with like

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speed and memory capacity are good this

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has been the ongoing guidance with seemingly no consideration for recent

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technological changes in the shifting bottlenecks within pcs and workstations

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for years so as part of the process of designing

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the workstations for our editors to find the optimal cost to performance

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compromise for a given workload i asked edzel to run some benchmarks in premiere

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pro after effects and photoshop all the

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creative cloud 2014 versions to investigate the effect of more CPU cores

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more RAM up to 128 gigs and varying

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storage solutions now i was half expecting scraps of paper with notes

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scribbled on them so that we could configure our workstations but what i actually got was a very detailed summary

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with useful charts that we'll publish separately on the Linus tech tip site in

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the link in the video description for folks who want to read it but for those

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of you who prefer videos well we made a video about it too so watch on oh and

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mash that subscribe button if you haven't already because our x99

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overclocking guide another great way of squeezing performance out of your hardware will be coming soon

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Corsair gaming RGB keyboards feature precision cherry mx RGB key switches for

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16.8 million color per key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization

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click now to learn more i'll start by introducing the test bench it's edzel's

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12 core xeon e5 2697 based workstation

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with the same ASUS x79 deluxe motherboard that we use in all of our

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editing rigs two GeForce gtx titans for accelerating 3d rendering a cooler

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master 1200 watt modular power supply a kingston 240 gig SSD and a wd one

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terabyte velociraptor for storage and normally 64 gigs of hyperx quad channel

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RAM but to properly investigate the effects of memory on performance we

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needed more RAM so we used eight 16 gig sticks of intelligent memory ecc

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RAM huge thanks to memphis by the way for providing this to us for testing

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giving us a whopping 128 gigs of RAM to either allocate to

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programs or use as a RAM disk to see if

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we could use excess memory in the system to alleviate storage bottlenecks

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so our premiere pro investigation started with allocating memory to the

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program via the preferences menu and rendering out projects at 1080p and 4k

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resolution with x264 we used x264

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because it was better optimized for multi-core processors which inherently

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utilizes more memory now remember that when we allocate memory to premiere that

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doesn't mean that's the amount of RAM in the system but rather how much of what's

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in the system we can afford to allocate purely to premiere to play with so at

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1080p we found that if you don't want to multitask on your machine while

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rendering eight gigs of system memory is likely to be fine there was no benefit

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to more RAM beyond our lowest tested six gig allocation at 4k though the story

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changes somewhat our rad project render times improved by seven percent when we

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went from six gigs to 24 gigs of allocated memory flattening out

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significantly after that demonstrating that the conventional wisdom of more RAM

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doesn't really help beyond a certain point continues to hold true but where

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that certain point is will depend on the type of projects you're working on and

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we found that our 4k prores renders benefited from up to 64 gigs of RAM on

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Windows 8 but not beyond for larger

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longer projects like movies you might end up needing more memory to keep

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things running smoothly while editing but render times still probably won't

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benefit much now since the usefulness of more RAM

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falls off a cliff past 64 gigs that left us with ha another 64 gigs of RAM to

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play around with in the system so we decided to see if we could utilize a RAM

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disk as a scratch disk and

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okay yeah uh faster storage here doesn't actually do much sort of render times

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aren't improved but a separate physical drive for a scratch disk whether it's

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RAM or or SSD especially SSD versus

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slower hard drives does improve the overall perceived system performance

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with more responsive playback faster file importing and faster project

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opening being some of the most noticeable benefits moving on to after

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effects our investigation changed somewhat to include both RAM allocation

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and CPU core scaling since we couldn't find much information about either of

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these topics RAM allocation in multi-processor rendering mode is a

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particularly confusing thing because

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adobe allows anywhere from one gig to six gigs with the caveat being that if

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you have too many cores for the amount of RAM that you're trying to allocate

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per core in your system let's say you have a quad core CPU 16 gigs of RAM and

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you go and try and allocate six gigs per core to total of 24 gigs derp the

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program supposedly simply won't use all

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of your cores in this case and on top of that it treats logical processors or

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hyper-threaded cores the same as physical ones so finding the balance

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here then is key the largest performance improvement from additional RAM

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allocation was going from one gig per core to two gigs per core so in theory

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then we should ensure that we have at least 48 gigs of RAM for a 12 core

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hyper-threaded after effects workstation but beyond that the law of diminishing

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returns should hit us pretty hard but then we noticed an interesting thing

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here and that was that even though our six gigs per core allocation should have

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required 144 gigs of system RAM limiting

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us to 19 of our 24 threads theoretically

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CPU utilization still hovered around 99

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even in this case so maybe hyper threaded cores really

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aren't affecting performance much which led us to our investigation into CPU

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cores and after effects performance we tackled this in two different ways first

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by using CPU scheduling to isolate our real course validating our hypothesis

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that hyper threading isn't really doing a whole lot in this case and then by

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disabling cores manually within the computer's UEFI BIOS to see how

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performance is affected by more actual physical cores so in that case

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performance improvements from having more horses pulling the cart were

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immediately noticeable and while not linear still demonstrated excellent

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scaling now you might think then what is the point of the CPU scheduling setting

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then why even bother with it well edsel found that reserving CPU cores even

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though CPU usage by the system didn't change much prevented after effects from

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being over scheduled and lagging out the system and we'll wrap things up in

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photoshop where the objective was to determine how much memory we would need

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for manipulating and resizing very large images on a beefy workstation like this

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one and the answer is well really not a heck of a lot while four gigs of RAM

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resulted in much lower performance than eight or more beyond eight gigs we

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didn't observe much of a difference but bear in mind that this will greatly

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depend on the size of your project and the history state setting so the project

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we used took 4.75 gigs of memory or scratch disk and you know the size of

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the project then of course greatly affects the memory usage of your actions

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so in our case while it's not something we can easily benchmark we did find that

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our SSD's performance was a bit of a bottleneck while opening projects or

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performing certain actions things we would have assumed adobe would try to do

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in memory first rather than relying on scratch so we did find that creating a

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RAM disk as the scratch disk could improve the user experience by forcing

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photoshop to write to RAM seven SSD but ultimately for raw performance it's just

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going to come down to how big is your project and how much of it sits in memory so that

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same old conclusion which i guess leads us to the rest of the conclusion

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in the last few years the general guidelines lots of processing cores lots

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of RAM and fast storage haven't really changed

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and they didn't change but i still hope that this video for adobe creators

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anyway helped to clarify which of these things might have a bigger impact on

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them personally speaking of impact we have a brand new

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watching today guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought

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it just sucked and leave a comment below letting us know

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actually i really want to hear what you guys thought of this video it's a little bit of a departure from our from our

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usual style a little bit more hardcore content creation as opposed to consumer

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thanks for watching guys oh yeah check out the link in the video description if you want to support us and help us make

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videos you can give us a monthly contribution buy a cool t-shirt like this one or just change your amazon

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bookmark to one with our affiliate code embedded in it so we get a small kickback whenever you buy more memory or

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CPU cores or faster storage thanks for watching and as always don't forget to

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subscribe

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you