Gadgetory

how much RAM should I get for my computer so many people ask the question and the only answer they can get from the in the know techies and I mean we've even done it here before is usually well how much are you planning to use yeah that much which is only useful if you know how much your workload requires for gamers it's relatively simple there's a number on the back of the box excuse me I digital information page cuz physical media but for content creators and our main focus is going to be on Adobe Creative Cloud because that's what we use here between Adobe's own system requirements and whitepapers and the numerous professionals on the message boards around the web there's no solid answer all we really hear is you need multiple fast storage locations more memory is good faster processors with more cores are good and video cards with like speed and memory capacity are good this has been the ongoing guidance with seemingly no consideration for recent technological changes in the shifting bottlenecks within pcs and workstations for years so as part of the process of designing the workstations for our editors to find the optimal cost to performance compromise for a given workload I asked ed zl-- to run some benchmarks in Premiere Pro After Effects and Photoshop all the Creative Cloud 2014 versions to investigate the effect of more CPU cores more RAM up to 128 gigs and varying storage solutions now I was half-expecting scraps of paper with note scribbled on them so that we could configure our workstations but what I actually got was a very detailed summary with useful charts that will publish separately on the line this tech tip site in the link in the video description for folks who want to read it but for those of you who prefer videos well we made a video about it too so watch on oh and match that subscribe button if you haven't already because our x99 overclocking guide another great way of squeezing performance under your hardware will be coming soon Corsair gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB key switches for sixteen point eight million color perky backlighting for virtually unlimited customization click now to learn more I'll start by introducing the test bench its ensel's 12 core Xeon e5 26 97 based workstation with the same as Zeus x79 deluxe motherboard that we use in all of our editing rigs - GeForce GTX Titans for accelerating 3d rendering a cooling Master 1200 watt modular power supply a kingston 240 gig SSD and a WD 1 terabyte velociraptor for storage and normally 64 gigs of HyperX quad channel ram but to properly investigate the effects of memory on performance we needed more RAM so we used 8 16 gig sticks of intelligent memory ECC Ram huge thanks to Memphis by the way for providing this to us for testing giving us a whopping 128 gigs of ram to either allocate 2 programs or use as a ram disk to see if we could use excess memory in the system to alleviate storage bottlenecks so our premier Pro investigation started with allocating memory to the program via the Preferences menu and rendering out projects at 1080p and 4k resolution with x264 we used x264 because it was better optimized for multi-core processors which inherently utilizes more memory now remember that when we allocate memory to premier that doesn't mean that's the amount of RAM in the system but rather how much of what's in the system we can afford to allocate purely to premiere to play with so at 1080p we found that if you don't want a multi task on your machine while rendering 8 gigs of system memory is likely to be fine there was no benefit to more RAM beyond our lowest tested 6 gig allocation at 4k though the story changes somewhat our red project render times improved by 7% when we went from 6 gigs to 24 gigs of allocated memory flattening out significantly after that demonstrating that the conventional wisdom of more RAM doesn't really help beyond a certain point continues to hold true but where that certain point is will depend on the type of projects you're working on and we found that our 4k ProRes renders benefited from up to 64 gigs of RAM on Windows 8 but not beyond for larger longer projects like movies you might end up needing more memory to keep things running smoothly while editing but render times still probably won't benefit much now since the usefulness of more RAM falls off a cliff past 64 gigs that left us with another 64 gigs of RAM to play around with in the system so we decided to see if we could utilize a ram disk as a scratch disk and ok yeah faster storage here it doesn't actually do much sort of render times aren't improved but a separate physical drive for a scratch disk whether it's RAM or or SSD especially SSD versus slower hard drives does improve the overall perceived system performance with more responsive playback faster file importing and faster project opening being some of the most noticeable benefits moving on to After Effects our investigation changed somewhat to include both ran allocation and CPU core scaling since we couldn't find much information about either of these topics Ram allocation and multiprocessor rendering mode is for a particularly confusing thing because Adobe allows anywhere from one gig to 6 gigs with the cabinet being that if you have too many cores for the amount of RAM that you're trying to allocate per core in your system let's say of a quad-core CPU 16 gigs of ram and you go and try and allocate 6 gigs per course a total of 24 gigs derp the program supposedly simply won't use all of your course in this case and on top of that it treats logical processors or hyper-threaded course the same as physical ones so finding the balance here then is key the largest performance improvement from additional round allocation was going from one gig per core to two gigs per core so in theory then we should ensure that we have at least 48 gigs of ram for a 12 core hyper-threaded aftereffects workstation but beyond that the law of diminishing returns should hit us pretty hard but then we noticed an interesting thing here and that was that even the large 6 gigs per core allocation should have required a hundred and forty-four gigs system ran limiting us to 19 of our 24 threats theoretically CPU utilization still hovered around 99% even in this case so maybe hyper-threaded cores really aren't affecting performance much which led us to our investigation into CPU cores and After Effects performance we tackled this in two different ways first by using CPU scheduling to isolate our real course validating our hypothesis that hyper threading isn't really doing a whole lot in this case and then by disabling course manually within the computer's UEFI BIOS to see how performance is affected by more actual physical course so in that case performance improvements from having more horses pulling the cart were immediately noticeable and while not linear still demonstrated excellent scaling now you might think then what is the point of the CPU scheduling setting then why even bother with it well EDD zl-- found that reserving CPU course even though CPU usage by the system didn't change much prevented After Effects from being over scheduled and lagging out the system and will wrap things up in Photoshop where the objective was to determine how much memory we would need for manipulating and resizing very large images on a beefy workstation like this one and the answer is well really not a heck of a lot while four gigs of ram resulted in much lower performance than eight or more beyond eight gigs we didn't observe much of a difference but bear in mind that this will greatly depend on the size of your project and the history state setting so the project we used took four point seven five gigs of memory or scratch disk and you know the size of the project then of course greatly affects the memory usage of your actions so in our case while it's not something we can easily benchmark we did find that our SSDs performance was a bit of a bottleneck while opening projects are performing certain actions things we would have assumed adobe would try to do in memory first rather than relying on scratch so we did find that creating a ram discuss the scratch disk could improve the user experience by forcing Photoshop to write to around a seven SSD but ultimately for raw performance it's just going to come down to how big is your project and how much of it sits in memory so that same old conclusion which I guess leads us to the rest of the conclusion in the last few years the general guidelines lots of processing cores lots of RAM and fast storage haven't really changed and they didn't change but I still hope that this video for Adobe creators anyway helped to clarify which of these things might have a bigger impact on them personally speaking of impact we have a brand new sponsor online as tech tips today that might impact your anime consumption habits crunchyroll crunchyroll is obsessed with anime 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below letting us know actually i really want to hear what you guys thought of this video it's a little bit of a departure from our from our usual style a little bit more hardcore content creation as opposed to consumer thanks for watching guys oh yeah check out the link in the video description if you want to support us and help us make videos you can give us a monthly contribution buy a cool t-shirt like this one or just change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code embedded in it so we get a small kickback whenever you buy more memory or CPU cores or faster storage thanks for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe