Without being facetious, the answer to that question should be pretty obvious. I hear too many people ask if having more ram will improve performance... well yeah, but only if it was running over in the first place (ignoring number of channels, ofc)
.More importantly, what kind of video ram usage to modern games use? I haven't seen an analysis of it for some time, clearly the GTX 460 758mb seems to do ok with less than a gig of ram, but how much is really needed?
It looks like performance is scaling linearly with RAM clock speed. Any chance you can add some 2000+ Mhz results as well? Seems like this should get the absolute best out of the APU.
Its not all that surprising that its a RAM bandwidth starved. Its sharing with the CPU and DDR3 running at these low speeds is hardly what graphics cards are used to. A High end GPU from AMD will have a memory bandwidth well above 100 GB/s, and two 1866 sticks are mere 30GB/s (theoretical).
Love these types of articles... I know this isn't the a/cpu for performance but when reviewing ram compatability it'd be great to read how it faired with all four slots filled and running at the spec'd speed of the ram. I like to read if new tech is improving high performance stability
Originally Posted by kaiser Without being facetious, the answer to that question should be pretty obvious. I hear too many people ask if having more ram will improve performance... well yeah, but only if it was running over in the first place (ignoring number of channels, ofc)
.More importantly, what kind of video ram usage to modern games use? I haven't seen an analysis of it for some time, clearly the GTX 460 758mb seems to do ok with less than a gig of ram, but how much is really needed?
I was wondering more how ram is allocated to video memory - static allocation or dynamic. So the test is a 4GB kit - how much memory is required to run the game and run the graphics and is that ram allocated dynamically - which means is there a minimum ram requirement for different games...
You know what I mean.
Also +1 on the 4 slot thing rather than 2 slots of memory...
Originally Posted by BrightCandle It looks like performance is scaling linearly with RAM clock speed. Any chance you can add some 2000+ Mhz results as well? Seems like this should get the absolute best out of the APU.
Its not all that surprising that its a RAM bandwidth starved. Its sharing with the CPU and DDR3 running at these low speeds is hardly what graphics cards are used to. A High end GPU from AMD will have a memory bandwidth well above 100 GB/s, and two 1866 sticks are mere 30GB/s (theoretical).
Bit mentioned that a overclocking review is coming, hopefully we will see resultw of quicker RAM speeds there.
Overclocking should be very interesting based on what I have seen so far. The TDP limit design imposted by AMD (each task given a tdp allocation dynamically) means that once you start pushing the CPU the GPU has less TDP budget to play with, thus your overall gaming performance may drop instead of improve (assuming you are using the Llano GPU and not a discrete one).
Overclocking just the RAM should allow for improvements all round, especially in scenarios that are heavily bandhwidth limited (gaming).
Originally Posted by BrightCandle It looks like performance is scaling linearly with RAM clock speed. Any chance you can add some 2000+ Mhz results as well? Seems like this should get the absolute best out of the APU.
1866MHz is the highest speed RAM that the processors are rated to run with and as a result that's as high as our board could take the RAM.
To get it to run faster you'll need to overclock, the base clock of the board, something which our test board didn't like doing (see our original Lynx review for more information). Hopefully we'll get more competent boards in in the future and be able to see how performance scales with even faster memory speeds.
Well, those were extremely predictable results but nice to see nonetheless. I would have liked to see the test expanded to cover the impact of 4GB vs 8GB kit as well though.
Originally Posted by Material Would you really out 8GB of RAM in a budget Lynx system though?
That depends on whether or not it was worth the outlay for the performance ;)
8GB isn't all that much money now, so also, 8GB RAM isn't unreasonable if you're a heavy multitasker when not playing games.
Only thing that's giving me pause is the price - as the better 400W passive Seasonic PSU can be had for about £120, which values the heatsink & (frankly ugly) case at about £280, which is not especially good value when the case looks to be worth about £50.
If I did build it, an extra few quid on RAM is small by comparison, especially if it does have a significant effect. Though saying that, I can't see going from 4GB to 8GB making much difference, it was the speed I was after...
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Reply.More importantly, what kind of video ram usage to modern games use? I haven't seen an analysis of it for some time, clearly the GTX 460 758mb seems to do ok with less than a gig of ram, but how much is really needed?
Its not all that surprising that its a RAM bandwidth starved. Its sharing with the CPU and DDR3 running at these low speeds is hardly what graphics cards are used to. A High end GPU from AMD will have a memory bandwidth well above 100 GB/s, and two 1866 sticks are mere 30GB/s (theoretical).
I was wondering more how ram is allocated to video memory - static allocation or dynamic. So the test is a 4GB kit - how much memory is required to run the game and run the graphics and is that ram allocated dynamically - which means is there a minimum ram requirement for different games...
You know what I mean.
Also +1 on the 4 slot thing rather than 2 slots of memory...
Bit mentioned that a overclocking review is coming, hopefully we will see resultw of quicker RAM speeds there.
Overclocking should be very interesting based on what I have seen so far. The TDP limit design imposted by AMD (each task given a tdp allocation dynamically) means that once you start pushing the CPU the GPU has less TDP budget to play with, thus your overall gaming performance may drop instead of improve (assuming you are using the Llano GPU and not a discrete one).
Overclocking just the RAM should allow for improvements all round, especially in scenarios that are heavily bandhwidth limited (gaming).
1866MHz is the highest speed RAM that the processors are rated to run with and as a result that's as high as our board could take the RAM.
To get it to run faster you'll need to overclock, the base clock of the board, something which our test board didn't like doing (see our original Lynx review for more information). Hopefully we'll get more competent boards in in the future and be able to see how performance scales with even faster memory speeds.
Feeling the same kind of love and that AMD really brought to us a really nice product and even a possible LAN party pc
Would you really out 8GB of RAM in a budget Lynx system though?
8GB isn't all that much money now, so also, 8GB RAM isn't unreasonable if you're a heavy multitasker when not playing games.
Yeah, it was worth it though! :)
I'm contemplating building a totally silent, 0db system that's still capable of gaming around this:
http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/pc-cases/nof-set-a40
Only thing that's giving me pause is the price - as the better 400W passive Seasonic PSU can be had for about £120, which values the heatsink & (frankly ugly) case at about £280, which is not especially good value when the case looks to be worth about £50.
If I did build it, an extra few quid on RAM is small by comparison, especially if it does have a significant effect. Though saying that, I can't see going from 4GB to 8GB making much difference, it was the speed I was after...
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