I’ve recently been bugging people on these fora about hardware for blender and I gotten a lot of good advice. Anyway, I’m about to purchase. But… well I’ve been doing quite well in the poker rooms recently so I’m thinking about getting more ram.
At the moment I’ve listed 8gig. My question is can you always do with more ram, or is there an upper limit that can feasibly be used. I’m think of getting a better mobo and gettin 16gb. or more??
or is there an upper limit that can feasibly be used
That motherboard can only go up to 16gig ram so that is the upper limit. If you get another board and more ram are you going to use it all. You’ll probably have to go with sticks with lots of ram in each so the cost can go right up.
That mobo has 4 memory slots so you could use 4x4GB sticks. If you want anything larger, just check the cost of 8GB RAM modules!
theoriatically a 64 bit system could handel about a trillabyte. but like rich says look at what your motherboard will suport and thats themax. since you already have 8 gigs i assume you aren’t running a 32 bit os which has a 4 gig limit. you also might want a better power supply. every peice of hardware you add draws more power, if you overheat your psu it will shut down your computer abruptly. you might get away with it a few times, i did, but eventually i and to reformat losing everything on my hdd and starting from scratch because it was too corrupted.
if you aren’t hitting your ram limits or even going ddr5 will improve your performance more than adding more ddr3 mem if your mother board will suport it.
Cheers guys,
Well upgrading both the motherboard and psu is certainly feasible.
I think what I’m really asking is, is there an amount of ram which is just silly. Unusable because that much data would be unrenderable in a reasonable time. In other words can the system be unbalanced. Does anyone know the specs of the machine they used for sintel?
But seriously, have you ever run into a situation where a part of your computer was so overpowered you didnt end up using the extra capacity? Cause I never have.
You should check how much memory you use when working with your computer, I have 2 gigs and my machine uses 400mb ram now in normal use with browser and few terminals.
When working with blender I never use max memory, but for windows games 2gb more would be nice.
I think with 8gb of ram simulations and possibly rendering are two areas of Blender that could consume that much memory everything else shouldn’t really trouble you.
tmcthree
If your on windows$$ use the task manager to find out how much ram using while your rendering and baking. If your using Ubuntu - gnome put a system md. applet on your top panel. Why ATI? Get an nvidia card. Every ATI card I’ve used had opengl issues. O why don’t you get the AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition AM3 Processor.newegg $165 its 50 more but a faster cpu will make more of a performance difference then extra ram.
