Power Computers

[Sunset]

I am bored and thinking of buying another computer, but wonder if I'm missing some details about memory.

I looked at Costco and they have this:

Dell XPS 8940 Tower with 10th Gen Intel Core i7 Processor, 64GB Memory, 2TB HDD, 1TB SSD and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Graphics

My current machine is: AMD® Fx(tm)-6100 six-core processor × 6
With 12 GB of memory, 1TB SSD. $1,799.99 Delivered

I have found I don't use the total of my 12 GB of memory (my swap is never used), so what do people want/need with Mega memory

 

[RunningBum]

CAD, video editing, maybe gaming, stuff like that. Future proofing, though I've always thought you should get what you need. By the time you need something more you'll probably spend about the same for your current + next computer as you would've with buying the top end.

 

[Sojourner]

Wow... 64 GB of RAM seems pretty excessive for a home/casual/recreational computer. I have 8 GB in my current rig, and I don't have any complaints.

I suppose 64 GB of RAM might be helpful for people running very specialized software, like high-powered, "prosumer" video editing programs. Or perhaps for extremely demanding, cutting edge gaming software. But I think it would be overkill and a waste of money for 99% of the rest of us. Just to be safe, though, make sure whatever PC you buy has a motherboard capable of handling up to, say, 24 or 32 GB of total RAM... just in case.

 

[MRG]

Applications that have a large working set of data. Images, movies, CAD applications. DBMS can exploit large memory for caching.

 

[USGrant1962]

I think you would be better off going directly to Dell and configuring one. That is a weird configuration - looks like it is made for video editing. Too much RAM yet a generation old video card.

Something like this for ~$1,600 is a more balanced system with a 2-step upgrade to the video card.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/des...rationid=9a7261a3-6906-4667-8b6a-1886ebc04b6d

EDIT

Oh, and I meant to say that even the burliest games these days are just barely using up 16mb. I think the RAM hog leader is the new MS Flight Sim.

I actually returned a PC to Costco a couple of years ago because its configuration was wonky. It had an overclockable Intel K-series processor in a low-end motherboard that didn't support overclocking.

 

[steelyman]

I ordered my iMac with half (16GB) of the RAM it can take and later filled it out with Micron chips. I knew I wanted to run a VM and wanted to be safe. It’s plenty and iMacs are easy to expand later.

 

[Sunset]

I was wondering about the video card in the Costco deal. It's almost like the extreme memory is like selling a car that can go 200 mph... most would never use it fully.

When I bought DW a 4K camera, I realized she needed a 4K monitor to actually see the full photo quality.
But her old computer couldn't drive the 4K monitor... of course this meant she needed a new computer, as video cards are pretty pricey, so it was worth it to just get a new system.
This was just to look at the photos.

 

[davebarnes]

I am bored and thinking of buying another computer,

1. I put 64GB in my new iMac because it was only $300. The iMac I replaced had 32GB and I used it. So, future proofing.

2. Don't buy. Build. My son-in-law is building a new gaming computer. $1200. Black Friday deals on parts. The graphics card has 3 huge cooling fans. If I were still silly enough to be using Windows machine, I would build. But, now, I just buy what Tim tells me to buy.

 

[Aerides]

$1700 for a year old desktop with an average graphics card sounds very high.

 

[USGrant1962]

I was wondering about the video card in the Costco deal. It's almost like the extreme memory is like selling a car that can go 200 mph... most would never use it fully.

When I bought DW a 4K camera, I realized she needed a 4K monitor to actually see the full photo quality.
But her old computer couldn't drive the 4K monitor... of course this meant she needed a new computer, as video cards are pretty pricey, so it was worth it to just get a new system.
This was just to look at the photos.

Yea, that's a nice video card. So nice I'm running one right now. But I bought it a year and a half ago, which is like a decade in videocard time.

 

[teetee]

I used to run a virtual environment to learn about networking. There are minimum 3 vms running on one computer at the same time. With 12GB RAM I can have each vm using 2GB RAM and still have enough for the host/hypervisor to run something else.

Some next generation sequencing data analyses, specifically mapping or variant calling, can eat up large amount of memory when the alignment depths are high(300x and above, sometimes over 100kx). One may be looking for cloud instance with 1TB RAM to start having hope to get over the coverage bump and slight chance to complete the analyses. Usually the question is more related to the data or algo than memory.

There is also database caching and physics modeling which uses as much memory as you have available.

I left the pc custom build a while ago after realizing it can be an expensive hobby. But it was fun.

 

[ERD50]

64GB Memory sure seems like a lot, but as mentioned, special uses could want that much.

I've loaded my current (6.5 year old! was surprised when I looked it up) with 12 GB RAM, and it is not enough for me, because I open windows/tabs in browsers, and tend to keep them open for a long time. Different subjects, and I decide I'll come back and finish looking later. About once a week, I have to quit Firefox, and then let it restart and "Restore Previous Session" which takes you back to where you were. But it cleans up the memory, and doesn't actually re-load the tabs/windows until you click on them.

So 64 GB might seem a crazy amount to some, but IME 12G is not enough, and 64 isn't so many multiples.

-ERD50

 

[statsman]

Hmmm, extra RAM for a Windows 10 PC? Useful for covering memory leaks that would normally cause you to have to reboot more often. Some sarcasm, some truth. From experience.

I have a prior version (XPS 8930, with Core i7-9700) with the same 64GB RAM, 2 TB hard drive, and 512 SSD. I don't recall ever seeing my memory usage exceed 20%, but it's been a while since I fired up my photo editor or digital music processing. I imagine the edit swaps would make good use of the extra memory.

One thing to note: My XPS 8930 can make a good deal of fan noise. All of that memory, Core i7, decent graphics card (in my case, the RTX 2060), and four internal hard drives (3 HDD, 1 SSD) seems to push the fans into active mode a lot. If you like your PCs to be on the quiet side, be aware of this. Mine is the one of the noisier Dell PCs I have ever used.

 

[jollystomper]

For general uses 64GB is not needed. But since I tinker with a lot of technologies and like fast response times I run some of my home tower servers with 64GB. I run multiple virtual machines and Docker containers on them (if that sounds like gibberish to you, don't worry, it will sound like gibberish to most people ). It makes it easier to play with different operating systems and technologies without needing dedicated hardware.

 

[mountainsoft]

I have found I don't use the total of my 12 GB of memory (my swap is never used), so what do people want/need with Mega memory

Extra memory can be helpful if you run multiple applications or background services at the same time, or if you have multiple tabs open in your web browser. It's also useful for memory hungry applications like photo and video editors.

By having extra memory, programs will generally run faster since Windows won't need to page memory out to disk as often. Of course, if you have an SSD for your system drive, this won't slow things down as much as a traditional hard drive.

That said, I've got 16GB in my current computer and have never had an issue. I usually don't run that many applications at the same time, but I do a lot of video editing. I wouldn't complain if a new computer had more memory, but I wouldn't intentionally seek out 64gb.

Also, unless you are a gamer or do some kind of 3D modeling or something, you probably don't need a fancy graphics card. The extra features won't be used by the vast majority of applications. For web browsing, word processing, photo editing, and most video editing, a simple graphics card will do the job fine. I have an older fanless (i.e. silent) GTX 750 graphics card and have never run into limitations with it, even when editing video. A more powerful video card with lots of GPU units might speed up video encoding, if the editor is designed to use them, but I usually opt for software encoding anyway to achieve better quality.

 

[Sunset]

I do see I made an error in the original post, when I added the price of the Costco machine.
I mistakenly put the price at the end of my machine, it should have been:

My current machine is: AMD® Fx(tm)-6100 six-core processor × 6
With 12 GB of memory, 1TB SSD.

My machine I built 8 yrs ago (estimated) cost me around $350 , and my new upgrade of the SSD added $100 to it.

I run linux on it, and find it good enough to run a development VM. However I have noticed it can be a bit slow when coding and running the webserver and database server on it.
For day to day use, it is more than adequate, but it's like having an old car, the shine is gone.

 

[Freedom56]

My main computer is a 16 core AMD 2950X Threadripper with 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 2 TB HDD, Radeon Pro VII graphics, and Samsung 32" 4K monitor. For most applications I don't need the horsepower but when I do 4K video editing with 10 bit (4:2:2) color and effects processing, it makes all the difference in the world.

 

[DrRoy]

My photo editing computer has 16 GB of system ram and a GeForce GTX 1060 with 3 GB of video ram. 3 years old. Got it from Cyberpower, which has open ended ability to customize.

 

[target2019]

I do see I made an error in the original post, when I added the price of the Costco machine.
I mistakenly put the price at the end of my machine, it should have been:

My current machine is: AMD® Fx(tm)-6100 six-core processor × 6
With 12 GB of memory, 1TB SSD.

My machine I built 8 yrs ago (estimated) cost me around $350 , and my new upgrade of the SSD added $100 to it.

I run linux on it, and find it good enough to run a development VM. However I have noticed it can be a bit slow when coding and running the webserver and database server on it.
For day to day use, it is more than adequate, but it's like having an old car, the shine is gone.

Thank you for clearing up the costco price confusion.

The person who would buy the costco system works in a small business and uses graphics, video or CAD software.

Everyone finds out that the processor is a bottleneck that eventually becomes a problem that can't be fixed.

You do have a kick-a$$ machine that is probably worth what it cost you to build.

 

[jim584672]

64GB of RAM is useless unless you are doing video editing, most of it will sit and idle for a regular user. Waste of cash.

 

[Ronstar]

I have 16gb ram in my MacBook Pro and sometimes get messages indicating that I'm running out of ram when I'm editing videos in iMovie and editing photos in photoshop. I could see getting 32gb of ram but 64 gb would be excessive for my video/ photo editing.

 

[Sunset]

I have 16gb ram in my MacBook Pro and sometimes get messages indicating that I'm running out of ram when I'm editing videos in iMovie and editing photos in photoshop. I could see getting 32gb of ram but 64 gb would be excessive for my video/ photo editing.

If you run out of memory, does it just slow down a lot due to swapping to the HD or does it just crash ?

I could live with the rare/occasional super slow down, but a crash would be very disappointing.

 

[Ronstar]

If you run out of memory, does it just slow down a lot due to swapping to the HD or does it just crash ?

I could live with the rare/occasional super slow down, but a crash would be very disappointing.

Just super slow downs. No crashes yet.

I run clean my Mac after this happens. And I also moved all movie files and iMovie library file to an external drive. Freed up hard drive free space from 8 gb to 393 gb on a 500 gb drive.

 

[wanaberetiree]

I am bored and thinking of buying another computer, but wonder if I'm missing some details about memory.

I looked at Costco and they have this:

Dell XPS 8940 Tower with 10th Gen Intel Core i7 Processor, 64GB Memory, 2TB HDD, 1TB SSD and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Graphics

My current machine is: AMD® Fx(tm)-6100 six-core processor × 6
With 12 GB of memory, 1TB SSD. $1,799.99 Delivered

I have found I don't use the total of my 12 GB of memory (my swap is never used), so what do people want/need with Mega memory

If you are technical and feel good about doing computer related things yourself, consider running some kind of hypervisor.

I use Proxmox (https://proxmox.com/) on ~1,000$ box with 64GB RAM and can run possibly 3-7 Windows 10 + Ubuntu instances with pretty good performance

 

[Ready]

I have a MacBook Air with the new M1 chip and it's insanely fast. Even with only 8GB RAM I can open up 20 applications and never see any slowdown. I expect the next version of the M series chip will end up in the 16" MacBook Pro where it will be crazy powerful. Intel has some catching up to do to keep up with these chips.