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Upgraded RAM = Better GPU Performance?

Arkious

Arkious

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 14, 2011
583
0
Newcastle, UK
Hi All,

I have just bought and installed 8gb of Komputerbay 1333MHz Ram into my iMac Late 2009 Core i7 Radion HD 4850. Runs fine as far as i can see, quite a bit quicker at booting and loading things but not tried throttling it yet. I thought at £26 i may as well try the stuff before going and spending a bit more on either samsung or hynix.

Anyways strange thing i noticed was under windows 7 which i use to play Star Wars - The Old Republic, i thought id do a performace rating update since installing the RAM.

Here are the results...

Pre Install,

Processor: 7.5
Memory (RAM): 7.5
Graphics: 6.0
Gaming Graphics: 6.1
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9

Post Install,

Processor: 7.5
Memory (RAM): 7.5
Graphics: 7.1
Gaming Graphics: 7.1
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9

Now i know that this test is very crude, but id understand if it were a 0.1 increase... but to me thats quite a significant jump!

Is this because it uses the RAM when using over 512Mb inbuilt?

I actually upgraded the RAM as when playing SWTOR it uses 3.3Gb of RAM, and then looking under dxdiag, its using 2.2Gb as video RAM. However i didnt expect to see such an increase in performance.

Has anyone else seen this or can offer any information?

My next upgrade is a 240Gb OCZ Agility 3 as it seems to take a life time to load content xD

Thanks for looking ^.^
 
MrNomNoms

MrNomNoms

macrumors 65816
Jan 25, 2011
1,156
294
Wellington, New Zealand
Arkious said:
Hi All,

I have just bought and installed 8gb of Komputerbay 1333MHz Ram into my iMac Late 2009 Core i7 Radion HD 4850. Runs fine as far as i can see, quite a bit quicker at booting and loading things but not tried throttling it yet. I thought at £26 i may as well try the stuff before going and spending a bit more on either samsung or hynix.

Anyways strange thing i noticed was under windows 7 which i use to play Star Wars - The Old Republic, i thought id do a performace rating update since installing the RAM.

Here are the results...

Pre Install,

Processor: 7.5
Memory (RAM): 7.5
Graphics: 6.0
Gaming Graphics: 6.1
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9

Post Install,

Processor: 7.5
Memory (RAM): 7.5
Graphics: 7.1
Gaming Graphics: 7.1
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9

Now i know that this test is very crude, but id understand if it were a 0.1 increase... but to me thats quite a significant jump!

Is this because it uses the RAM when using over 512Mb inbuilt?

I actually upgraded the RAM as when playing SWTOR it uses 3.3Gb of RAM, and then looking under dxdiag, its using 2.2Gb as video RAM. However i didnt expect to see such an increase in performance.

Has anyone else seen this or can offer any information?

My next upgrade is a 240Gb OCZ Agility 3 as it seems to take a life time to load content xD

Thanks for looking ^.^
Click to expand...

That seems a bit strange for it to happen - it raises a question as to how the benchmarking actually works in the case of Windows because it would seem strange a performance improvement given that if was a requirement for more memory it would have taken it as required.

Btw, regarding the SSD, I'm unsure as to how reliable they are with iMac's - IMHO I'd have a look at the Samsung SSD 830 or OWC ones which have a pretty good track record from what I have seen.
 
Arkious

Arkious

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 14, 2011
583
0
Newcastle, UK
MrNomNoms said:
That seems a bit strange for it to happen - it raises a question as to how the benchmarking actually works in the case of Windows because it would seem strange a performance improvement given that if was a requirement for more memory it would have taken it as required.

Btw, regarding the SSD, I'm unsure as to how reliable they are with iMac's - IMHO I'd have a look at the Samsung SSD 830 or OWC ones which have a pretty good track record from what I have seen.
Click to expand...

yes i thought it was strange too, especially since the ram rating didnt increase after going from 1066 to 1333 and the graphics did haha!

ahh okay, thanks very much for that information... i shall do just that :)
 
Arkious

Arkious

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 14, 2011
583
0
Newcastle, UK
well im mighty impressed with this Komputerbay RAM!

significant performance increase on SWTOR and its been on almost 2 hours now and its not caused any bother at all! best £26 ive spent ^.^
 
L

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,202
19,063
Well, a computer is a joint system and each weak point can hamper performance. If RAM was a bottleneck earlier, more RAM will increase all scores. In regards to video memory, the things can be rather complicated: usually the graphics data (like textures and models) are mirrored in the RAM and streamed to the GPU as needed. It much depends on how the particular application handles it.
 
Arkious

Arkious

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 14, 2011
583
0
Newcastle, UK
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I understand :)

So in turn then, upgrading the hard drive to an SSD will increase the speed at which data can be loaded to the ram and then to the graphics card etc?

This will again remove a bottleneck?
 
L

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,202
19,063
Arkious said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I understand :)

So in turn then, upgrading the hard drive to an SSD will increase the speed at which data can be loaded to the ram and then to the graphics card etc?

This will again remove a bottleneck?
Click to expand...

Well, don't start jumping to conclusions, as I already said, the things can be rather complex. An SSD *may* improve the performance if you application handles huge data (like geographical models) and has to continuously stream it to the GPU. But you won't find lots of 3d applications where disc access is a big bottleneck. Most games (if coded right) intelligently preload the data before its actually needed and use all sorts of optimizations. But yes, it is likely that SSD will improve the performance of a game which relies on map zones etc (like most modern online games such as WoW and STWOR do). In a nutshel, poorly coded games will probably benefit more than well coded games :)
 
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