Decision Time...

Welcome all!

now then, u noticed my thread on Ram, well, it is decsion time...

I will be doing 1600x1200 renders, using bryce, 3dstudio max 6 and Cinema 4d....

i have a P4 3.0ghz
512Mb DDR333 ram (2x256mb)

I need to know, do i get:
2x512Mb DDR400 Ram,
or save up for 2x1gb DDR 400 Ram?...

I need to know, will 1gb be enough for the renders, and to eliminate the windows page file?

let me know

Nucleo


(side note.....how do i know if my board runs dual channel?...)

Dude -- you are so into this! I love it. Going back to what I think I said once before, if you want to know if your board supports dual channel, you need to check with the mobo manufacturer. In terms of what you can get for RAM...allow this suggestion.... For what you are doing graphic -wise find the MAX RAM in the best config it will support. Your renders must be pretty huge based on what I've seen, and I think you are going to push that to the max over time.


But to go back to my original statement, the only way to know how you can max out a mobo is to ask the manufacturer what it will support max. and how it can be configured.

lol, thanks

but, what i gues i am asking is, will doubling and buying faster Ram improve my render times.

i am ordering the Ram on monday, so i really need to know if it will be worth it, or i buy a new vid card lol

I can't tell you for sure if it will be worth it. I don't think it will hurt to have it, but it's hard to say how much it will help you. I'm thinking there's 4 things primarily involved in your renders. 1)RAM 2)CPU 3)FSB 4)Math Co-processor

Your maximum throughput will be limited by anyone of those four. What you mih do is try a couple large renders and monitor your CPU utilization. See how it's performing. If you're pretty much maxed on your CPU during your renders, I doubt additional RAM will help much.

Those are just educated guesses. More than likely someone more educated in hardware will come along and blow my theory apart. Which would be OK with me. I'd rather see you get good solid info than guesses and opinions.

i think Ram will be the main problem...
if i start a render in cinema 4d, and i have been using intensive apps before it renders, it will tell me i dont have enough memory.
i have to restart to get it to work

i have a p4 3.0 ghz, i dont think that needs upgrading

but i have been told that the 512mb pc333 ram is a bottleneck, because the cpu is designed to run with DDR400 Ram?

That would be my opinion. You're definitely not getting the full potential out of the PC333.

I agree, I say save up for the 2x1gb's, I do 3d modeling my self, and i notice the difference, with the faster ram and the greater capacity. Have you tried using a render farm, I might be able to render some things for you here, I have a few dual xeons with 4gb of ram, which do one hell of a job.

hmm....
i dont think i have enough cash for the 2gb lol

i don't think you should save up for the 2 gig because you will be making them on windows which isn't well disinged for anyting over 1 gig after one gig windows starts getting confused and till slow you down by a miniscule time. now on a 3-4 hour render it'll slow you don't about 5-10 minutes. i had benchmarks I'm going to see if i find them. anything after one gig starts to slow down again.


** heres the review
here
it has benchmanrks and shows how the right ram amount and ram type is important. its pretty long but it has benchmarks were a 3.0c p4 is beet by a 2.8c only because the 2.8 has low latency ram and the 3 has very good ram by the same company just a lower tier.

the review on ram amount it about ten pages down its a really long review. you can skip everything else but i recommend you don't.
ram amount here

how about this
buy a single 1 gig, then later you can buy another gig when you have the cash

no cuz he has an 800 32 bit fsb and a 400 16 chip of ram will slow him down. beside most 800mhz fsb mb hold 4 stick ha can get 2 512 and when longhorn comes around and is better prepared for higher memory he can upgrade. defenatly dont wanna end up wiht just one stick of ram that will be worse then the DDR 333 botleneck he has now

I would go for a pair of Gig chips. I'm on 512Meg here, and it chugs doing even the most basic tasks on large (but not huge) 3008x2000 pixel images (this is the format my camera takes).

On 768Meg ram, it's a little more bearable. On a gig of ram, it's a lot more bearable.

2Gig ram may slow general processes down, due to the time it takes for Windows to compensate for the larger amount, but the amount of time it saves caching to the hard drive's virtual memory is going to more than make up for it, and speed up your workflow.

Right now I'm looking to go 1.5Gig DDR400 in this PC (Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe & Barton 2500). 512Meg really is unbearable.

The other thing is, even though you're doing 1600x1200 renders now. If you want to produce something larger in the future for prints, posters, etc. You're going to want to start rendering much larger (300dpi for a 20x16 print is 6000x4800 pixels), so more ram is definitely going to help, especially when you start post-processing in Photoshop, and the history starts building up with undo's on huge images like that.

i don't think he will fill more then one gig on rendering an image. but if you do go for it remember low latency ram makes an enormous difference.

Well, if it's taking several hours to render an image, he may wish to work on other images in Photoshop, or just generally use his PC while it's rendering in the background.

The rendering itself may not take up a lot of RAM, however the 3D software to generate it (Max, Maya, etc.) usually needs a lot of ram to store hte history - or it can get kinda unstable), as does Photoshop...

Even when not rendering, if you're playing around with huge images, Photoshop alone can demand a LOT of ram (like I said, even with 6.1MP Photos, I'm going to the hard drive a LOT with only 512Meg).

Besides, if he can afford it, why not? Get it now, you'll need it in the future

IMO and I have close m8's who do 3d and 3d Animation work and this is just a guide of what they say...

For Games: 512MB
For web design: 512MB
For print and Photo work: 1GB + (Multi task Photoshop with vector pakage)
For 3d still rendering: 756MB - 1GB + *
For 3d Rendering many frames of animated stills including hungry water: 2GB - 3GB*

* Dual processors can help alot here.