CPU ramblings (was: Photos of you guys)

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earlz
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Re: CPU ramblings (was: Photos of you guys)

Post by earlz »

Malevol3nt wrote:Ed: Funny, I tried to reply but someone must of changed the topic. :D

Anyway..

I bought some 3 gigs of ram along with a new mobo & CPU a year ago. And you know what? I almost never use more then 1GB of ram at a given time. Now when I look back, I think I could of saved some money by buying a set of 1GB ram + some 500MB extra just in case. I'm not even pushing my CPU all that hard either, it's an AMD x2 5600 (2.8Ghz) and it still hasn't let me down with any new apps or games.
ever tried compiling any big projects? grab firefox source, that should give your CPU an interesting push..

and I only have 512mb of RAM on both my computers. I hardly ever get down to less than 70mb of free RAM(this is including running virtual machines too), but that's OpenBSD for ya, lightweight as hell.
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Re: CPU ramblings (was: Photos of you guys)

Post by Malevol3nt »

earlz wrote:
Malevol3nt wrote:Ed: Funny, I tried to reply but someone must of changed the topic. :D

Anyway..

I bought some 3 gigs of ram along with a new mobo & CPU a year ago. And you know what? I almost never use more then 1GB of ram at a given time. Now when I look back, I think I could of saved some money by buying a set of 1GB ram + some 500MB extra just in case. I'm not even pushing my CPU all that hard either, it's an AMD x2 5600 (2.8Ghz) and it still hasn't let me down with any new apps or games.
ever tried compiling any big projects? grab firefox source, that should give your CPU an interesting push..
I rarely do a clean compile on big projects. So buying the latest Core i7 would save me.. a couple of minutes every month or so? Well anyway, I don't really need all that processing power (yet), so I'm happy with this little dualcore right now.
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NickJohnson
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Re: CPU ramblings (was: Photos of you guys)

Post by NickJohnson »

earlz wrote:ever tried compiling any big projects? grab firefox source, that should give your CPU an interesting push..
On my laptop (900MHz Celeron-M), the latest build of firefox never takes me more than a couple of hours if I use a ramdisk to hold the source tree, and that's using GCC with lots of optimizations. Now if I could only get the actual program to run fast :lol: .

But I think RAM is pretty important, just because of the cache. My current 1:10 RAM to disk space ratio gives me great cache performance. It's dirt cheap, and the more of it you have, the closer you get to real Turing completeness!
earlz
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Re: CPU ramblings (was: Photos of you guys)

Post by earlz »

NickJohnson wrote:
earlz wrote:ever tried compiling any big projects? grab firefox source, that should give your CPU an interesting push..
On my laptop (900MHz Celeron-M), the latest build of firefox never takes me more than a couple of hours if I use a ramdisk to hold the source tree, and that's using GCC with lots of optimizations. Now if I could only get the actual program to run fast :lol: .

But I think RAM is pretty important, just because of the cache. My current 1:10 RAM to disk space ratio gives me great cache performance. It's dirt cheap, and the more of it you have, the closer you get to real Turing completeness!
It may be cheap(as in $20 can get you a 2gb set of 2 1gb sticks) but most motherboards have lower maximums of RAM still. Heck, I recently scrapped up a 2007 64bit computer with SATA(with 3 DDR2 ram slots) and it maxes out at 2G
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