RAM - How Much Do You Need? Testing with 128GB of ECC
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,947 words · ~9 min read
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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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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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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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