Memory Upgrade

[John Chain]

Hello again, I currently have 512MB of RAM on my computer and a CPU with hyper threading. Which upgrade would be better for multitasking: a CPU with Dual Core Processing or adding another 512MB RAM card?

[John Chain]

Windows XP, sorry about the title. I was hearing abou how dual core processors speed up multitasking by a lot since they run two threads at once. However I am not willing to spend 1300 dollars on a new CPU rather than 65 dollars on a new RAM card. So I was just curious. Is it more of a multitasking advantage to have more RAM or dual core processing?

[patio]

You would also for it to be cost effective find out what processors your MBoard supports...this might hinder the decision of more RAM vs. More processor.

My gut reaction would be more RAM.

patio.

[Flame]

You know, RAM helps with executing programs, but multitasking seems "iffy" to me... I would trust a processor over RAM for multitasking reasons.... Here's why... On my old computer I had an AMD Athlon processor at 950 MHz, and also had 896 MB of RAM installed. On my new computer I have a Pentium 4 at 3 gigs with 1 GB of RAM... Now, 896 and 1 GB are not far away from eachother, so the difference might not be too big... Here's my example... On the old computer I would try to say open the AOL 9.0 browser while listsning to music (off the computer). Well, the music would get choppy, and AOL would be slow until I close one of them. On the new computer I am able to do this flawlessly!    Also, I'm listening to music while playing games! lol  So my money is probably on a new processor rather than RAM... What processor do you have now John?

[glb]Flame[/glb]

[Raptor]

Listening to music requires very little resources.

[Gitta Lubke]

I have a related question, I have a dual processor computer and would like to check whether the program I'm using frequently to run simulations is actually smp-aware. I've heard there are unix tools for windows (my machine runs under windows) that are useful to monitor the two processors. Any ideas?
thanks.

[gitta]

my computer is a Dell precision workstation that runs dual xeon processors, and the software I'm using is a statistical package called Mplus

[GX1_Man]

my computer is a Dell precision workstation that runs dual xeon processors, and the software I'm using is a statistical package called Mplus

What are the requirements for that program? This all sounds a little steepp in the hardware department.

[pcdoc4christ]

Looks like John is another P-n-R (Post and Run).

[Raptor]

Looks like John is another P-n-R (Post and Run).

 

Maybe the amount of posts in this thread got a bit over his head.

I know I wouldn't bother reading all this crap.

[christina123]

i sent u an e-mail but i never have been on these sites. i am not sure how to contact u. i have a ? about windows xp if you can help let me know. Thanx

[GX1_Man]

Hello again, I currently have 512MB of RAM on my computer and a CPU with hyper threading. Which upgrade would be better for multitasking: a CPU with Dual Core Processing or adding another 512MB RAM card?

System Requirements for this program (from the website)

Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP/ME
8 MB of RAM
10 MB of hard disk space

I think he is on overkill already!!!!!!

More horsepower is not going to help anything.

[gitta]

I don't quite understand the remark concerning overkill. The jobs I'm running at the moment take between 10 minutes and 14 hours computing time, and a whole simulation study consists of hundreds of individual jobs, which is why I have a dual processor setup to cut down the total time. My question was how to monitor that the jobs are indeed distributed to the two processors.