Old 01-16-2019, 08:43 PM   #161
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Old 01-17-2019, 09:43 PM   #162
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What are you talking about? 8GB is more than enough for most people. If he uses lots of sample banks in Kontact or something, yes I would definitely recommend more RAM. It's easy enough to see the RAM usage for the system to know if that's a problem. There's a performance meter in Reaper and there's also utilities the OS has.
That has not been my experience. Maybe my usage pattern is different. This desktop only has 16GB of RAM, and it's the least I've had in a long time. And I consistently stay at about 70% usage when I'm doing anything. I'm going to upgrade it to 32GB at some point. I might offload some of the stuff I do to a server in the closet. But...that's a much bigger investment than 32GB of RAM.
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Old 01-17-2019, 11:19 PM   #163
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That has not been my experience. Maybe my usage pattern is different. This desktop only has 16GB of RAM, and it's the least I've had in a long time. And I consistently stay at about 70% usage when I'm doing anything. I'm going to upgrade it to 32GB at some point. I might offload some of the stuff I do to a server in the closet. But...that's a much bigger investment than 32GB of RAM.
Could look deeper but Win10 compresses a lot of memory that would have been freed up via paging in earlier OS versions. One result of that is appearing like more memory is in use than there actually is, well it is but it is compressed and kept in memory in the compression store.

In some earlier versions of 10, it was a little too aggressive and there would be low memory errors when there wasn't really much going on. That improved in later revs, either way that needs to be taken into account. My machine with 24GB shows 40% usage and hardly nothing is running, that's why.
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Old 01-18-2019, 01:15 AM   #164
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I was speaking from experience in Windows 7 since I didn't use Windows 10. Also my current experience with Linux. So if Windows 10 likes keeping stuff in memory, and especially if you have more memory to use, that would make sense; I'd just never seen it firsthand.

Currently I have a Reaper project loaded with some synths (no sample banks), Firefox with a dozen tabs open and a download running. My memory usage is around 2.6 GB (of 8 GB). Closing everything except the OS, it's around 300 MB used.

I do recall when I ran a Mac for a while a few years ago, it had the "memory pressure" approach which I read about at the time. It seemed it was always using almost all of my RAM, and I was concerned. I guess Windows 10 now does something similar.

So JSMastering: you might not need more RAM. If you load large sample banks in Kontakt (or just have very large projects with a great number of audio and/or video files), that's different. But going based on what your task manager shows in Windows 10 "on the surface" isn't the whole picture. If "doing nothing" it's taking up 70% of 16 GB RAM (around 11 GB for the OS itself and whatever utilities/services are running in the background), if that were true it'd be insane.

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Old 01-18-2019, 10:48 AM   #165
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Could look deeper but Win10 compresses a lot of memory that would have been freed up via paging in earlier OS versions. One result of that is appearing like more memory is in use than there actually is, well it is but it is compressed and kept in memory in the compression store.

In some earlier versions of 10, it was a little too aggressive and there would be low memory errors when there wasn't really much going on. That improved in later revs, either way that needs to be taken into account. My machine with 24GB shows 40% usage and hardly nothing is running, that's why.
That actually makes a lot of sense. But, I hover around 70% used if the computer's been on for more than a couple hours.

Now...I am running VMWare Workstation pretty much constantly with 1 VM taking up about 8GB, assuming it pre-allocates the RAM I have devoted to the VM (it doesn't show up in task manager that way). That VM shows 2GB active another 2GB that isn't used but hasn't been cleared and 4GB free, so I could get away with less devoted to it. Windows Task Manager shows the compressed ram value at 0.

It isn't a problem for what I do, but even with the inflated RAM prices we've been seeing, it's not that expensive to just have a little more.

I am not looking forward to paying for the 64GB ECC RDIMM kit (around $750 for stuff on the QVL for the motherboard) for the storage server. But the way zfs uses ram for caching makes it seem like the right choice. Plus, I plan for that computer to last ~10 years...and to pay twice that on SSDs and HDDs.

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So JSMastering: you might not need more RAM. If you load large sample banks in Kontakt (or just have very large projects with a great number of audio and/or video files), that's different. But going based on what your task manager shows in Windows 10 "on the surface" isn't the whole picture. If "doing nothing" it's taking up 70% of 16 GB RAM (around 11 GB for the OS itself and whatever utilities/services are running in the background), if that were true it'd be insane.
Well...it isn't causing problems. VMWare Workstation is probably responsible for most of it.

I haven't had even a fresh, clean Windows install use less than a couple GB on its own since windows 2000 and the days of < 1GB of RAM available. But...I'm a unix/linux-guy at heart. And sometimes, it seems like computers somehow know those things and treat the user accordingly.

Until this build, my rule of thumb was that laptops get 16GB, desktops get 32GB, and servers get as much as they need. And you can get away with less for linux/unix desktop systems if you need to for some reason. I'd still rather over-buy RAM than under-buy. It's not hurting anything to have more.

I'm not sure anything could convince me to build a computer with < 16GB at this point. For good desktop memory, it's around $130-150 as long as you're not paying inflated system integrator prices. That's very little for insurance.
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Old 01-18-2019, 11:03 AM   #166
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it's not that expensive to just have a little more.
I'm a fan of having as much as you can get.
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Old 01-18-2019, 12:56 PM   #167
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Well...it isn't causing problems. VMWare Workstation is probably responsible for most of it.
Ah!

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I haven't had even a fresh, clean Windows install use less than a couple GB on its own since windows 2000 and the days of < 1GB of RAM available.
Up until a few months ago I'd been running Windows 7 64-bit. I think it used around 1 GB of RAM when "doing nothing", but I really do mean as close to nothing as possible since I would turn off unnecessary services for the machine.

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And you can get away with less for linux/unix desktop systems if you need to for some reason.
Because it's the best and everyone should be using it.

Anyway no argument about buying more RAM than 8 GB these days. I just haven't bothered to since my machine is a few years old and I don't seem to need any more. When I eventually get a new MB/CPU/etc. no doubt I'll end up buying more than 8 GB RAM. That's kind of the trend; every time I significantly upgrade the computer, double the RAM. That's mostly due to how long I use a computer before getting a new one, and how RAM prices have decreased "per GB" over the years.
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Old 01-19-2019, 03:02 AM   #168
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Because it's the best and everyone should be using it.
Agreed. Wholeheartedly.

I'd switch in an instant if it didn't require wine or some other nonsense to run what I need. Fortunately, I can get by with one windows computer and everything else running FreeBSD (plus one centos machine). Well, and my phone. But it doens't count as computer.
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Old 01-23-2019, 07:50 AM   #169
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Random little discovery about my RAM usage.

I also remembered that I'm using integrated graphics on this computer. And 1 or 2 4k displays at the moment. Since it's shared memory, that uses a substantial portion of it (up to 8GB; typically around 2).

Putting on of my spare graphics cards in it would reduce RAM usage. But, at lest for what I'm planning, I don't have the PCIe lanes to spare for the graphics card. More RAM is significantly more "cost effective" than going for a workstation/HEDT setup that I don't need (the difference in what I do between my 8086k and any of the xeons or X series processors is irrelevant).

If it starts paging regularly, I'll end up either getting an NVMe drive specifically for the pagefile (can windows even do that?) or buying another 16GB kit.
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Old 01-23-2019, 10:34 AM   #170
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Yeah it's not worth getting graphics cards if it's a system you don't use for gaming. Reaper doesn't use GPU to render any graphics, as far as I can tell. Comparing using a graphics card, to using my mainboard's onboard Intel graphics, the CPU demands are the same when tested with the same graphics-intensive plugins (multi-channel spectral analyzer, for instance), and my graphics card shows no load at all. So it's down to CPU for that. If your system is stable using the onboard graphics, I'd keep using it that way.
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Old 01-23-2019, 10:36 AM   #171
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Yeah it's not worth getting graphics cards if it's a system you don't use for gaming.
Add video editing to that list. It's the only reason I have a better than average video card, and video is often more likely to fall within a musician's wheelhouse as far as needing both on the same machine.
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Old 01-23-2019, 10:39 AM   #172
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Add video editing to that list. It's the only reason I have a better than average video card and video is more likely to fall within a musician's wheelhouse.
I have a hot-rod gamer video card with metal tubing and a massive heat sink in my DAW. I do video editing as well, but my DAW is also dual boot. Linux for all serious things, REAPER included, and Windows strictly to run Steam and play a handful of graphically demanding video games.
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Old 01-23-2019, 10:48 AM   #173
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Add video editing to that list. It's the only reason I have a better than average video card, and video is often more likely to fall within a musician's wheelhouse as far as needing both on the same machine.
That's right. I hadn't thought of that since Reaper doesn't use GPU for video, that I've noticed anyway (and I don't use other video editors).
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Old 01-24-2019, 04:50 AM   #174
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Yeah it's not worth getting graphics cards if it's a system you don't use for gaming. Reaper doesn't use GPU to render any graphics, as far as I can tell. Comparing using a graphics card, to using my mainboard's onboard Intel graphics, the CPU demands are the same when tested with the same graphics-intensive plugins (multi-channel spectral analyzer, for instance), and my graphics card shows no load at all. So it's down to CPU for that. If your system is stable using the onboard graphics, I'd keep using it that way.
Yeah. Apart from gaming, rendering, and video editing, I've been impressed with intel integrated graphics for a long time.

I think the first time I really discovered how well it works was back when my brand new overkill hackintosh build with an nvidia whatever couldn't run 4k due to OS X limitations but my budget i5 laptop running linux would run it fine.

The 8086k will run 2 4k displays (DP@60Hz + HDMI@30Hz because that display is old) including scaling (125% for the 27", 150% for the 40") with zero issues. It may or may not do more. I haven't tried.

Before you ask, no the 30Hz refresh rate on that monitor doesn't bother me. But, I'm not gaming on it or staring at it. It's mostly just more space to put things that I don't need to look at that often. And pretty pictures that get covered up when I'm actually doing things.

Every time I do something with this computer, it impresses me more...except for Windows...which is fine but not impressive for someone who's been using unix/linux so long. Sadly, plugin wrappers don't make me happy.
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