is Ram proportional to #of cores ?

[fadi3d]

Hello guys,

what i hope to know is if Ram and the # of cores are related ?

i want to buy a new pc for rendering (9550 vs 2 Xeon 5420 ) i have noticed for a 64 bit operating system 8 meg is really recommended, so is using 2 Xeons quad will mean i have to double that to 16 meg ?

any light shed on the matter is most welcome.

Thank you in advance.

[shaneis]

Not really, not for normal use anyways (i.e.: non-overclocked use). There is a relationship between the motherboard and the amount of RAM you use. All motherboards have a maximum amount of RAM that they can utilise, these days it's around 32 - 64 GB for a typical Xeon board, but it can go higher.

 

For your set up on a 64-bit OS, 2, 4, 8 or 16GB will be fine. It's up to how much you want to spend.

 

Happy rendering!

[fadi3d]

shane thank u for the quick reply.

 

i am sorry but do u mean that the cores will be sharing the Ram and not splitting it equal (like when rendering using Max and Vray) ?

thank u and cheers

[shaneis]

No, that's not what I mean... to keep it in simple terms;

 

Max and VRay are applications that have been written to utilise multi-threaded and multi-cored CPU's. They will access memory differently to an application that has not been written for multi-thread/core CPUs.

 

I think you may be confusing yourself here. On your line of thinking, you are assuming that Max and VRay will utilise 16GB RAM (4x4GB) differently to 16GB RAM (8x2GB). For all intents and purposes, it won't.

 

My advice is this, if you can afford 16GB of RAM, and you have 4 slots on the motherboard, you will have to buy 4x4GB sticks. If you have 8 slots available, you have the opportunity to buy 8x2GB sticks - which is probably cheaper. Unless you are building a HPC on a massive Tyan server board or you're building a Cluster, you don't have to worry about this. It comes back to what I said before...what's the maximum amount of RAM your motherboard can utilise and how much can you afford.

 

Simple! If you really need to know the finer points of RAM, L1 and L2 cache, BUS etc, then go here http://computer.howstuffworks.com/ram.htm but I can guarantee you, after reading it all, you will come back to this question, "how much RAM can I afford?".

Edited October 25, 2008 by shaneis

[fadi3d]

dear Shane thank u for ur answer and sorry i didn't get back to u sooner.i had problems with my net connection (due to stormy weather as i was told) the link is great too .thanks again.

cheers.

[shaneis]

No problems, glad I could help. Wow, one storm and your net's out for a week! That's one bad storm. Stay dry

[fadi3d]

and if i told u that my max download is @ 12Kb per sec ...

that's the price of living in the "3rd world"

thanks again