mhz, ram, how do they use each other for speed?

[Borgster]

i was wondering what mhz, and ram are, and how do they work together to give your computer the speed it was made at? theres all these numbers, i believe that mhz is up to 3.6 gigaherts, and ram is higher than 512, i am currently on a 598 mhz, 128 mb ram cpu, and i was wondering if i would notice a huge difference in performance getting a higher amount of mhz, and ram speed? also how do these work when playing high performance games like urneal tournament 2003?

[overdo]

mhz is the clock speed of the processor. it is the frequency of calculations per second - ie a 1 mhz machine performs 1000 computations per second. the highest pentium 4 at the mo is 3.06Ghz (commercially available i think anyways). RAM is the amount of temporary storage memory available.

processor ->cache (L1 then L2) -> RAM -> Hard drive

that is a basic chain of how data can get to a processor. the closer the source, the quicker the data is processed basically. so data in the cache can be processed quicker than data in the hard drive.

when u play a game, 3 things really determine how well it runs. graphics card - the displaying of the game, RAM and CPU - how quickly the game runs. best bet is to up ur RAM imho but ur cpu could do with an upgrade to soon. nice athlons around which are relatively cheap.

ps u might wanna ask krell or search the forums.

[wonderboy2005]

like overdo said, MHZ is a frequency. 1hz, or hertz, is once per second. kilo is 1000, and mega is 1,000,000 and giga is 1,000,000,000. so the latest intel processor "does its stuff" so to speak, 3,060,000,000 times per second.

RAM is an acronym for Random Access Memory. it is the temporary holding place for data on your PC. your processor cannot read data right from your HDD, so it must go thru the RAM first. RAM is measured in bytes. one byte is 8 bits, or 8 1s and 0s. for example "01001110" would be one byte. again, RAM has the prefixes "kilo", or 1000; "mega", or 1,000,000; and soon to come "giga", or 1,000,000,000.

in my opinion though, it wont be long before solid state drives (drives basiclly made up of RAM) will be poping up. that will cause a huge revolution in computing. no more ram will be needed, and your PC's potential will go up exponetially.

[phalkon30]

Great posts guys, I know there's some I can add, but I'm not possitive on what I would say, so I'll let somebody else do it

Your hard drive can make a HUGE impact on performance, its glacially slow compared to ram, or processor speeds

One thing you want to look at, is bus speed, the new P4 systems have a FSB (front side bus) of 533mhz, but don't get that confused with the 3.06Ghz CLOCK speed

Ram also has a bus speed, Rambus ram (RDRAM), can currently go over 1000Mhz on the bus speed, but its a 64bit channel, compared to the 400mhz DDRRAM (Double density rate) which is 128bit

gah, feel free to correct me on that, its too late to think hard, but I didn't want to see this thread go down the ZP shitter

[Psilaxs]

I will add a short little tid bit, since most everything has been explained.

I have 3 HDD hooked up to my machine, one is a 7200 rpm the others are 5400 rpm, i run my operating system and most of my games from my 7200 rpm 20 gig. Now, there isnt THAT BIG of a difference between 5400 and 7200 for a variety of factors, MB RAM etc My games play fine on my 5400, they just load slower then on my 7200, but actuall performance during gameplay is fine, because i have enough ram to keep windows from dipping into the swap file.

So, if you want your games to stop "chunking out" add more ram, thus will alleviate the need to access the swap file.

Wow, turned into a longer post then what i thought lol.

[Krell]

Exactly Psilaxs,

Thats why I posted ALL those links, because, someone, long ago, in a galaxy far far away . . . . . wasnt playing unreal tourny, they were writing articles allll about this subject.
See the link in my sig? read it
Been to tweaktown? been to x-bit labs? thetechzone . . . .

Anything that we try to illustrate here is an abbreviated explanation. Study each thing independantly. The CPU . . the memory . . . the system buses . . . . eventually, their interdependencies will just make sense to you.

READ READ READ

The core of your question, is faster\more better? The answer is yes. To an extent. The speed at which your computer makes decisions and processes entire threads of data is blazingly fast, and in fact, your PC is dying of boredom. Most of the time, your computers is running at a tiny smidgen of what it is capable of.

The faster we make computers go, the more code is written in to programs. The more instruction that is written in to programs, the faster we make computers go, and so on , and so on. Unlike the early days of the PC market, even todays mediocre PCs are very capable. You will never out type them.

For the past several years, the term "convergence" has been an interest of mine. My PC has always been my television and home theatre. And even 5 years ago, my typical Friday night found me watching HBO on my PC, downloading files, Chatting in multiple chats, and talking VoIP with some chick in Australia, or online gaming.

No computer should run at 100% of its capabilities 100% of the time. So to handle increased workloads, and for convenience, we build them faster, more robust. The over-all performance of a PC is limited by its weakest link. If you have fast memory, but not a fast CPU or proper chipset drivers or settings, you are not efficient.

So you have a FAST processor . . . ooweeeee . . . but you have very little RAM, then your PC has to write little post-it note back to the hard drive, little I-O-Us . . . and that s l o w s things down.

PC evolution is fairly symbiotic. Components and sub-systems are developed to work in conjuntion with one another. You will find that processors, memory, and chipsets have their own "clicks" and you cant mix them.

Will you see huge increases in performance if you signifigantly upgrade? Oh hell ya ! Keep in mind that to handle the demands in the video arena, most video cards do most of their own work right on the card. They themselves have fast processesors and 128Mb ram.

The bottem line in gaming is FPS and bandwidth. Want to play DOOM III? You had better have the goods.

hope this helps

[Psilaxs]

DAMN krell, sometimes it is hard to tell if you are agreeing with me or correcting me LOL. But i believe i get the jist. (Speaking to me in a manner so that others may "over hear" what is being said ;) )




Oh, and eveerything you posted was well said

BEST Regards,

[dsllsd]

Word of advice. If you wqant a blazing computer always add more RAM, RAM is the cheapest upgrade you can make to a computer with the most noticable results. A 900.5 GHz Processor sure sounds fast, but you need RAM to store all that processed data. If you have the bare minimum of RAM and a 8 trillion GIG processor, you will notice a lot of lag because there is nowhere to store all that data fast enough. So, Always add more RAM. My Celeron 760 Mhz (over clocked) with 512RAM is faster than a Pentium 4 2.0 Gig with 256RAM

[Munchables]

I was about to say "I am so glad some one did not say adding more ram sped up your computer" but then fucking Dick Sucking Lips opend his mouth.

Well I am glade that the rest of you are smart enough.

I was thinkin' you probably wan't me to explain. I think DSL as going to start getting mad.

Ram is a lot faster than your HD so to kind of cheet they load what ever you need from your slow drive into ram. That is what loading time is.
OK see a 1.5m app can load only a max of 1.5m (well doc's get loaded into ram too but only if you open them) Now I have never seen a app that loded it's entrie self into ram. there is no reason why it would need to do such a thing. I am interensted in a program that did.

Now if you don't have enough ram than your comp uses HardDrive space. Which is slow, so if you have like 64meg running xp then yeah you better get like a 256m SOON and you will notice the difference.

Now I had a gig of ram on my last computer. Well there is this littel trick what I did was put all the maps (that i needed) into a ram disk. What I did was pre loading the game, because when you are running around blowing people apart with the auto-shotgun it is a really messes with your killer instinkt when you are wating for A FUCKING MAP TO LOAD!

Now having a gig of ram did nothing but make my boot time a littel longer, one if not the first thing your computer does when you press that littel button it see if your ram is ok.

[dsllsd]

Originally posted by Munchables
I was about to say "I am so glad some one did not say adding more ram sped up your computer" but then fucking Dick Sucking Lips opend his mouth.

Well I am glade that the rest of you are smart enough.

I was thinkin' you probably wan't me to explain. I think DSL as going to start getting mad.

Ram is a lot faster than your HD so to kind of cheet they load what ever you need from your slow drive into ram. That is what loading time is.
OK see a 1.5m app can load only a max of 1.5m (well doc's get loaded into ram too but only if you open them) Now I have never seen a app that loded it's entrie self into ram. there is no reason why it would need to do such a thing. I am interensted in a program that did.

Now if you don't have enough ram than your comp uses HardDrive space. Which is slow, so if you have like 64meg running xp then yeah you better get like a 256m SOON and you will notice the difference.

Now I had a gig of ram on my last computer. Well there is this littel trick what I did was put all the maps (that i needed) into a ram disk. What I did was pre loading the game, because when you are running around blowing people apart with the auto-shotgun it is a really messes with your killer instinkt when you are wating for A FUCKING MAP TO LOAD!

Now having a gig of ram did nothing but make my boot time a littel longer, one if not the first thing your computer does when you press that littel button it see if your ram is ok.



I will say Munchables, your spelling has improved greatly. Did you re-enroll in the third grade for the sixth time. You must have hired a tutor at least. Keep working on those posts too, one day you just might make some sense. Say hi to your Mom for me too, i'll pay her next Friday when me and my boys show up with the "Donkey".

[Psilaxs]

@Munchables,

No offence but you are quite apt at repeating what Krell the others and I have already stated ;)

Oh and RAM WILL improve performance, but in specific areas.

No it wont enable someones 300MGHZ p2 to play SOF2 but it will improve swapfile usage (E.G Less)
And when your comp has to continually access the hdd it is a huge hit in performance while playing games.

[Krell]

LOL

Psilaxs I was backing you up. I think we end up saying the same things over and over and over . . .

btw . . . is it me or does anyone else think munchables has the right avatar?

[dsllsd]

Originally posted by Krell
LOL

Psilaxs I was backing you up. I think we end up saying the same things over and over and over . . .

btw . . . is it me or does anyone else think munchables has the right avatar?

I thought that WAS.... an actual picture of Munchables.

[phalkon30]

The reason I mentioned HD speed, is because when you do have to write to the disk, its the slowest point. No matter how much ram you have, it still has to go to the hard drive at one point or another

But like everybody has said over and over here, yes, it will increase performance greatly over what you have, on your system, I would be surprised if you could run UT2K3

[Krell]

Thats a good poing Phalkon30

It can be very difficult to notice or utilize some of the benefits. AT-100 is obviously a faster bus than AT-33, if your drives support it.

A 7200 rmp drive is not really faster if you are only AT-33 enabled. Minor differences in seek time help, as does cache size, but you will need ALL of those to work together to tell any difference.

Does this hard drive speed advantage I speak of help my downloads? hell no.

Does this bus speed and good controller set affect moving a movie from a drive on one bus to a drive an another bus, Ohhh yaaaa.

I move a 700Mb movie across drives in about 35 seconds on average, with downloads and uploads like mad.

What if I have one slow drive, and one fast drive? Youre only transfering as fast as your slow drive can handle.

What about across partitions? The data still has to traverse across the same bus and controller, so it can actually be slower than moving to another physical drive.

Thats all I have without more caffiene

bye

[chipperrox]

Speaking of ram and drives, who thnks its about time for solid state drives (really durable drives made entirely out of ram=much faster than hard drives and not needing extra ram to run them) to hit the markets en masse? eh- I think the technology is there but the industry isnt pushing it

[phalkon30]

Actually, I started to see those types of drives last year, or at least the concepts of them, one of the major tech events had one, a 3 gig I think

What I'm waiting for is M-Ram, magnetic ram, its much faster/smaller than todays ram, and is done by switching poles from on to off, so you could have an instant on computer (you don't need electricity to keep the info in memory), I had heard it would be coming out around 2004, 2005, I'll wait and see

[chipperrox]

well Ive seen 30gb solid state drives, but not for consumers really, just for special places and companies who have the money to afford it.
yo phalkon, can u get some info or something on those m-drives for me? They sound really interesting and I'd like to know more.
peace

[phalkon30]

I love google....second result for "m-ram"

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/chip-tech-01d.html

It sounds like it could completely redesign chipsets, all parts of them

Hmm, for some very technical specs of this ram, check out http://unit.aist.go.jp/nano-ele/spinics/sld004.htm

Looks to be some really cool stuff, combine that with enhanced 3d optical storage, and that technology talked about in the PS3 thread, and you've got one hell of a computer, which in theory, is only a few years off....

[chipperrox]

after reading the first one- it basically sounds great, but unless they have another breakthrouh, you'll have to put on your winter coat and boots before you turn on the computer :)

the second one- i didnt understand...it used some pretty big words man

[FriedSpam]

Anyone want to help we out with my virtual memory settings?

I've put the swapfile on my secondary hard drive (freshly formatted, so it should be fragmented :wings ) and set it to a fixed ammount but I'm not too sure how much I should set it to for best performance.

Will a too bit a swapfile degrade performance? -I've got mine set at 2GB at the moment (maybe a bit excessive?).

What's the best settings for performance?

P4 2.8Ghz, 512MB ramm, Win XP....

Thanks!

[Krell]

That may be a good idea, and I would use 768Mb as that setting, but . . . . tell me what you will be doing with the other drive, it matters, then I will tell you more.

[FriedSpam]

Sorry for the late reply, things have been a little hectic recently...

OK. Well, I'm not too sure myself, so it's probably best if I tell you my setup and see what you suggest.

I've got a gigabyte GA-8IHXP motherboard (intel 850E chipset) so that gives me four IDE connectors (or RAID) and a floppy connector.

I've got two 120GB drives (WD 8mb cache jobbies), a plex combo and a lite-on cd-writer. Apparently (according to Gigabyte) if a CD-RW is connected to IDE 3 or 4 it will only run at 16x speed because of a PROMISE RAID chip limitation.

I basically want a fairly stable sytem with good performance, though it might be nice to back up some of my files on my second hard drive (maybe just a straight copy, maybe with something like Norton Ghost).

At the moment I've got both Hard drives on IDE1 and The Lite-on as master and the Plex as the slave on IDE2 (I use the Litey most). I've disabled IDE 3 and 4.

Is this a good way of doing things? Is it a bad idea to have the virtual memory on a drive I'm using to (possibly) back up files?