Reducing ram from 24Gb to 16Gb what if any hits on performance might I see?

Hi
V5 64bit win7
Pc was 32Gb (4 x 8Gb), currently 24Gb with faulty stick out, however…
I am reluctantly having to remove healthy ram stick of 8Gb as makers require a pair returned (faulty and healthy) for replacement with paired set.

24Gb will be reduced to 16Gb during this process.

What will the effects be ?

Does Rhino rely as much on the video card (4Gb) as system ram ? I am noticing a screen freeze of sorts on one model with 36 un block lightening holes created. Might this get worse with 16Gb or is it dictated by video card ?

Steve

this is just anecdotal but to me, rhino seems to run decently well on crappy hardware with the most noticeable difference in performance coming from the CPU speed.

i have a laptop with 4GB ram and a desktop with 24GB ram… they both work well… certain functions (certain booleans / number crunchers) are noticeably quicker on the desktop but i believe it’s because of the faster and newer architecture CPU…

that said, i rarely work with huge models so maybe there’s a difference there regarding ram…

anyway, my point is that i doubt you’ll notice a difference between 16GB ram and 32GB ram when all other hardware is staying equal.

Think of RAM as storage just like a hdd is storage, and you don’t need more than you need.
So if you don’t use more than 16 GB then there will be no performance hit at all.

I keep this windows gadget running on the desktop at all times.
It give CPU use per core and also on the bar on the right shows ram use.
http://windowsgadgets.xyberdyn.com/
If the red ram bar stays below the max level during your normal work with 16Gb of ram then you don’t need more.
If you’re not using the the ram above 16Gb then having more of it in your PC is a waste as it lies there doing nothing. Michael VS

I would not knowingly run a computer with bad RAM. Anything can happen from a silent problem, to blue screens, down to a corrupted hard drive.

Many Linux distribution install disks, such as “Mint” with “Cinnamon” include MemTest86, the defacto standard for memory testing. For your purposes, avoid installing anything, such as the operating system itself. When in doubt back up your computer first.

In Windows, you can CTRL-ALT-DELETE, your computer once, which opens the menu,
from which you can choose Start Task Manager. You can click on the Performance tab, to see how much memory you are using.

(In the screenshot, I am rendering, which drives up the memory usage, in this case about 3 times as much as when not rendering.)

You can minimize task manager.
Start Rhino. Load a large project.
Maximize Task Manager again.
Click on the Processes Tab in Task Manager.
From here you can see how much memory Rhino is using, or in this case Firefox.

Rhino is pretty efficient for memory usage, and doesn’t seem to leak noticeably.
Rendering does take a lot of memory. For a large project, you may be able to work, but not render.
If you have enough RAM, your machine won’t use virtual memory much*, or run out.
If you run out of real RAM, your machine will use the hard drive for virtual memory, which will slow down things unbearably.
Large textures use more memory than anything on a video card. So, unless you have a lot of textures, your video card will likely be fine, unless it’s an Intel Integrated GPU.

*Lastly, if you don’t have a SSD, Windows will use virtual memory even when it doesn’t need to, which slows down your computing experience. Both of my machines have virtual memory deactivated.

Hi, One more note about ram. Make sure that the good 8gb stick that you remove to send back with the bad one is from the same ram channel on your motherboard as the bad one. That way the remaining 2 x 8gb ram sticks will still be in the same channel and will run in dual channel mode which can be 2 x faster than single channel mode, because the motherboard can access both chips at once on the same clock cycle. This is why there are many tests which prove that eg. A single 8Gb ram stick (In single channel mode) performs significantly worse speedwise than 2 x 4Gb sticks in dual channel mode. Check your motherboard manual, but normally the memory slots are different colour pairs to show the channel groups. Michael VS