Computer RAM Upgrade

[CarbonCAD]

I have a Dell T5500 and I don't think that it has enought RAM. It is at 4GB right now, but I could have up to 48GB. Where is the cut off point at which it is just a waste of money, and What kind of processing time improvement should I expect to see if upgraded to let's say 12GB. It seems most people here stop at about 12GB.

[gcode]

I'm running 12g in both my home and work rigs

 

I've been meaning to upgrade my home rig to 24g but haven't gotten around it it.

 

You will see a difference moving from 4 to 12... I don't know if going to 24 or higher would make any difference.

[Guest JP @ Cimquest]

. I don't know if going to 24 or higher would make any difference.

 

Only noticed if you're doing VERY high end CAD stuff with large assembly files or RAM intensive calculations

[jeff]

I have a Dell T5500 and I don't think that it has enought RAM.

 

Are you using the max speed of RAM that your motherboard will allow?

If it's a Dell, then most likely you're not, that would be the first thing to look in to, then go for 8GB or 12GB depending on what type of work you do.

Then go HERE and buy it, you can get 8GB for $45 on up.

[CarbonCAD]

I also use ProE/Creo and sometimes parts with many features and large assemblies do cause some slow downs.

 

It looks like the motherboard is at a max of 1333MHz and that is what I have for RAM speed also (Good point though). I would like to note the odd choice of "sticks" that it came with. There is one 2gig and two 1gig, so from what I recall that different motherboards can be limited to certain combinations of RAM. That being the case and from what I am hearing I think one 8GB stick would be a good choice for now. Thank you for the help.

[Pilot Plant Supervisor]

I also have a T5500, with dual quad core Xeon 2.27GHz, two Nvidia Quadro 4000 graphics cards and 12 gigs of ram. Mine seems like it should be faster as well. I am not too savvy with computers so how do I check motherboard speed and ram speed?

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

How many RAM slots do you have? You'll get the best performance splitting the RAM evenly among the slots and running dual channel. I've got four 4GB sticks on order to replace my four 2GB sticks; sposed to get here tomorrow. Oh, in addition to the MHZ of the RAM, pay attention to the latency numbers. Some RAM is faster than others at the same clock speed.

[gcode]

Crucial Memory has an app you can run that will tell you what type of

memory you have, how many slots and how much you're currently running.

Its very handy and much easier that poping the case open for a look

[mayday]

We have 2 Dell M6600 laptops with the quadro 3000m cards

1 has 8 gig and 1 has 12 gig

 

benchmark test only shows about 5 seconds difference.

Where it does seem to help is on the graphics side. mosly with solidworks and very complex models

[jeff]

There is one 2gig and two 1gig,

 

 

You want the same stick in any slot that you use,

2x4GB or 4x2GB

 

 

Myself, I prefer the 2x4GB

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

I have enough to run Mastercam, CATIA, and CAMplete simultaneously with no issues. Granted, my CATIA assemblies are not massive, usually a dozen of so pieces.

 

Below are my system specs.

[NOTW Programmer]

64bit also makes a big difference in toopath calculation, I saw a tremendous performance increase when I installed X6 x64 and only 4Gigs of RAM.

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

Makes a big difference with Stock Model operations too. If your stock model gets complicated enough to use up your RAM and start swapping to disk you can basically forget about it.