Is this desktop computer pretty powerful graphically?

Your link is so broken as to be useless. It is impossible for anyone to even attempt to help you.

Yeah, that's perfectly acceptable. It will spit out good 1080p at med-high to high settings at a good 45-60fps on any game you care to name. I'd bump the ram up to 16GB some time in the next couple of months, and probably put the OS on an SSD when you get your Windows 8 upgrade, leaving the 1TB drive for games. That's if you want to do any upgrades at all.

Yes, games will look better than PS3/360 games, but not so much better as to be mind-blowing. The advent of FXAA and solid 30fps gameplay over the last year on the consoles has narrowed the gap between console and PC versus letting the gap expand further as you would expect with 6 year old hardware.

16GB of RAM are you serious? And "solid 30fps" narrowing the gap??? That's one of the reasons PCs are far superior to consoles, not to mention the ability to upgrade. 30 FPS is absolutely unacceptable on a PC. If I showed you Skyrim with all my mods (another plus for PCs) compared to the PS3/360 you would clearly see a huge difference in graphics. OP the 8GB on that is more than plenty, you do not need more. I game on 4GB on new titles and have zero issues. Also that PC is going to be a beast and eat up any current title out there on max settings.

"I game on 4GB on new titles and have zero issues."

So your argument is that since you are absolutely starving your machine for ram, he should be perfectly satisfied starving his machine in the same fashion? Well, unless you are running XP still, or a 32-bit Vista/7, in which case you are very much running the wrong OS. 16GB of ram? It doesn't cost that much, it's what I'd upgrade if I were to change anything, and it will make the Windows experience better. Maybe you aren't aware, but Vista+ predicatively pre-loads things for you. It will eat as much ram as you throw at it, and every extra bit you throw at it will improve the end user experience.

In addition, take 95% of the population and stick them in front of Mass Effect 3 on the 360 running it's 720p with FXAA at a very solid 30fps, and then a stacked PC running 1080p with 8xMSAA at 60fps and highest settings. They will tell you it looks the same. Even for the most demanding of people, the perceptual difference between those two results isn't enough to really get excited over. Yeah, it's nicer, but it's also a case of throwing 20x the power at the problem for maybe a 20% perceptual improvement. The human visual subsystem just isn't that good, and unless you know exactly what to be looking for, the highest possible PC gaming output just isn't that much different from the consoles. The numbers say 1080p is twice the resolution of 720p, and 60fps is twice as fast as 30fps. Reason says that should be 4x as good, but the human brain says it's still far slower than it scans at, is still a fake looking game, and is wasting resolution that the brain doesn't care about and can't even process.

Do you think that modern PC gaming is vastly better than modern console gaming? Then you are vastly overestimating the abilities of the pretty crap human input systems. We evolved to be really good at breeding and killing, not picking out the difference between one or two million dots.

"If I showed you Skyrim with all my mods (another plus for PCs) compared to the PS3/360 you would clearly see a huge difference in graphics."

Oh, and you don't have to "show" me anything, my gaming PC is very capable. Combined with my rather extensive knowledge of modern rendering techniques and tricks, I know exactly what to look for. I am also rather versed in human physiology and our susceptibility to suggestion. There are a hell of a lot of cases where humans, being the poorly perceptive creatures that we are, with our horrible memories when it comes to detail, can easily trick ourselves in to thinking item A is so much more X than item B. In example, look at how you colored your response to state that your 4GB of ram is a perfectly acceptable amount, when empirical evidence stacked to the ceiling states very simply that "Yeah, 4GB is okay I guess, but damn is Windows starved. You sure do spend a lot of time waiting for things to move in and out of your swap file."

I am simply stating that for a gaming rig 16 GB is way overkill. And while my PC could certainly use more RAM (I do video conversions that I would love to lower the amount of time it takes) my OS is by no means slow. My SSD drives helps with that . Also check the recommended specs for any game, the toughest to run show 4GB RAM. That's because most games are developed under a 32bit architecture. Hell most programs are 32bit and only use up to 4GB RAM under a 64bit OS. The benefit of having 16GB is so that the OS has more memory to allocate to multiple programs running at once, which if your plan is to game and photoshop at the same time by all means load up on RAM. I never meant to suggest that 4GB was something people should shoot for on a gaming rig, I simply meant that if I have no issues at 4GB then 8GB was more than plenty. You seem to think that consoles are close in performance to PCs in regards to gaming and they have 512MB shared memory. Now I know that they're GUI does not use as much memory as a full OS but I think it proves my point that games don't require a ton of RAM. It's hard to compare a game between PC and console when the game is a console port, like Mass Effect is. Sometimes there is not a lot of extra time put into the PC version. There are, however, plenty of pic comparisons out there that show the graphics on a PC are much better than console, Crysis 2 and Skyrim are some good examples out there.

Somebody is A) completely missing the point, B) stuck in 2008 as to their views of 64-bit software penetration, and C) doesn't understand SuperFetch.

joeforsale, you are not related to Ballmer & Gates are you?

The OP asked if games would look better on his rig compared to 360/PS3, and you responded to upgrade to 16GB and to get an SSD(do you understand superfetch because it is of no benefit to SSD?). If I was wrong in what I said than by all means explain the reasons why. That's what this forum is about right, learning?

Troll much?

"do you understand superfetch because it is of no benefit to SSD?"

Somebody paying attention would notice that I had already explained SuperFetch to you back at post #6. I don't care how fast your SSD is, even if you have 40 of them stacked in to some amazing RAID 0 mutation where all of them are feeding data at the same time, you still aren't going to come close to the speed of just having the thing you want to use already loaded in ram. SSDs absolutely benefit from SuperFetch. In addition, a machine with a standard platter hard drive and enough ram will provide a better user experience than a machine starved for ram with an SSD. If you want to actually put your SSD to proper use, get more ram. 4GB is starving a modern system, no matter how much you want to try and proclaim that it is not.

At 6GB my Windows machine is still hungry for more ram. Sitting here with Chrome and Steam open, I'm physically using 3.2GB, but I have 121MB free. Why? Because Windows knows that I'm going to want to play Team Fortress 2 shortly and has already loaded a good chunk of it up. If I gave it another 10GB to play with, I would have the same ~100MB free, as other things I commonly do would already be loaded up as well when I went to use them. At 4GB, you have enough ram to load your OS, browser and Steam, and that's about it. SuperFetch is starving so much as to be ineffective in your setup. I'd argue that given the choice between moving to 8GB, or getting an SSD, you made the wrong choice.

"you responded to upgrade to 16GB and to get an SSD"

Somebody interested in what was actually said instead of stubbornly sticking to their broken viewpoint would note that the quote is: "Yeah, that's perfectly acceptable. It will spit out good 1080p at med-high to high settings at a good 45-60fps on any game you care to name. I'd bump the ram up to 16GB some time in the next couple of months, and probably put the OS on an SSD when you get your Windows 8 upgrade, leaving the 1TB drive for games. That's if you want to do any upgrades at all. " I told him exactly what he asked about, and then made suggestions as to where to go from here if he so chooses. You're making it out as if I told him his system was crap unless he makes my changes.

I then went on to elaborate on how it will compare to a 360, exactly as he asked. That part apparently offended you though, as we now have a couple of days where you repeatedly attempt to make a failed argument.
Edited by darklordjames - 2/9/13 at 1:14am

Prefetch is automatically disabled on SSD. Here's a quote from MS about that: “If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive will all be disabled.” I understand your point though, and with the OP loading his games on the 1TB HDD there would be a benefit to superfetch. Again if I were recommending a build I would definitely suggest 6GB-8GB, I plan on getting more RAM but definitely not because of superfetch. IMO it's a waste of money (I mean if you have the money go ahead and put the max amount your board can handle) to buy more RAM because you want your programs to load faster. Also, due to the nature of prefetch no matter how much RAM you have your system is going to look "starved". Lastly, I am in no way offended or mad. I simply disagree with some of the things you've said.

"Prefetch is automatically disabled on SSD"

Well damn, you're right on that one. The reasoning as to why looks questionable though. Instead of modifying Superfetch to handle boot files properly on an SSD, Microsoft just disabled it. The net effect is extending SSD life to the the detriment of overall system performance. I didn't think MS would be that lazy when it came to one of it's core improvements from Vista.

From a quick google, you can turn it back on, and it would make sense to, assuming there is enough ram present.

"IMO it's a waste of money to buy more RAM because you want your programs to load faster."

Says the man that bought an SSD so his programs will load faster... RAM is dirt cheap, yo.

The original point still stands. Moving to 16GB would be the next logical step on that machine, and for very good reasons.

I'm going to agree with JoeForSale, 8 GB of RAM is more then enough for gaming. I have 16 GB in my main desktop but thats because I tend to heavily multitask and too lazy to close things where I'll eventually end up with 30 plus browsers open along with a number of other programs. But I see no reason that he should need to upgrade to 16 GB of ram, unless he wants to do lots of multitasking. But to agree with darklordjames, upgrading the memory is probably one of the simplest/easiest things he could do for relatively cheap, but unless he's really a power user, he probably won't notice the difference at all...

Moving to a SSD on the other hand would be the best upgrade decision, besides a new graphics card eventually....

~Ninja

"unless he wants to do lots of multitasking"

Again, completely ignoring predictive loading...

Haha yea good point . I did read that the reason prefetch was disabled was because prefetch defrags its directory which is not good for SSD. I wonder though if you could set the directory on a separate HDD. I also read that some worry about superfetch causing problems with SSD because it reads too often, but that isn't true because writing to SSD is what kills it over time. I think I'm going to try and re enable superfetch with my SSD just to see if there is a noticeable improvement.

"I think I'm going to try and re enable superfetch with my SSD just to see if there is a noticeable improvement."

There won't be. Remember, 4GB isn't enough to let Superfetch effectively do it's thing. In addition, being disabled on your system I'd say it's 50/50 on whether Superfetch has been logging usage data, but it certainly hasn't logged when the predictions miss. Superfetch takes a good chunk of time to kick in. Add another 4GB, then turn Superfetch back on, and things will be quicker to load in about a month.

Superfetch was used on Vista where recommended memory size was 2GB. I'm sure superfetch would perform better with more RAM, but it should improve load time regardless. I know I wouldn't notice it for a while though.

Memory requirements for everything else in your system have not stayed static for the last 5 years...

I agree but all I'm saying is that no matter how much RAM I have superfetch will take up the rest of what's not being used to help with load time. Granted I run with pretty low RAM amount, I can load up 3 different applications at once and my usage never exceeds 60%. Granted gaming will, but I don't run other programs while gaming.

"Never exceeds 60%"

...because Windows spends a bunch of time dumping stuff out to the swap file to desperately try and keep some resources open.

There is no case in which you can accurately claim that your system is not starved to death when it comes to ram. Windows does a really good job of trying to keep things fluid for you, but there is only so much it can do with very limited resources.

Back to your original claim that you run with 4GB, therefore his 8GB will be fine? You are not speaking from a valid point of reference. If your board is maxed out and won't take another chunk of ram, hey cool, I understand. I'd also find it hard to justify dumping in a new board, CPU, and entirely new ram just to pick up some better caching. If your board is not maxed out though, and you can fit another 4GB in there, then again I say that picking an SSD over more ram was the wrong decision.

Look at it this way. PC manufactures have never, at any point in history, put enough ram in a shipping system. Usually they are short by about 50% of what is useful and 75% of what is actually desired and optimally functional. The standard shipping amount of ram today is 4-6GB. Where does that put your "4GB is fine" argument again?

"I don't run other programs while gaming."

Ha! Now you are moving in to joke territory. Tell us another one. There is a ridiculous amount of stuff just hanging out in the background of any modern system, all of it vital, all of it chewing up ram. Having Steam and Chrome open is the least of it.

To be clear, I am in no way trying to make you feel bad about your system. My iOS dev platform/Windows 8 Mac Mini is capped out at 8GB and starving, but it will stay that way until it goes in the trash. My primary system is at 6GB and starving, but it's hard to justify the other 2GB it will take as DDR2 has become rather expensive. My entire point is that you are attempting to give advice based on a faulty expectation of performance. As such, the advice is bad by it's very nature. Your experience with 4GB has no baring on whether 8GB is acceptable or 16GB is preferable.

It is perfectly fine if you find your 4GB system to be acceptable. Just don't go advocating what you find acceptable as the desired level of performance, especially when the object at hand is so incredibly dirt cheap.

I didn't choose SSD over more RAM, I had 8GB and sold it and honestly haven't noticed a huge difference. I'm well aware that while I'm gaming things are running still in the background, what I meant was nothing significant. And I think I am absolutely thinking in a valid point of reference. I game on 4GB RAM no problems at all. <- That's a period. So I am fairly certain I can say to the OP that 8GB is more than plenty. You keep saying "starving", please stop. You seem to be basing how much a RAM a system needs based on what superfetch is taking, and if so that is a bad way to base how much RAM a system needs. Superfetch will use up every little bit of unused RAM it can. I could care less what you think of my system. I can game on the games I play just fine, and run/stream 1080P content through XBMC just fine. Could I benefit from more than 4GB of RAM? Absolutely. My issue is that your telling the OP that he should invest in additional 8GB of RAM for a gaming rig. "just don't go advocating what you find acceptable as the desired level of performance...", but isn't that exactly what you're doing? I'm done with this conversation unless you can show me evidence that your statement is true. Otherwise I wish the best.

PS It is asinine to assume that everything running in the background is "vital".

That is a solid computer spec wise,

I would not bother with more ram it has not shown any measurable increase for me in any games. I have 16 Gb it almost never uses more than 4GB, I am not sure what darklord does that pushes ram maybe some huge raw files in photoshop or something but not modern games.

Also that CPU you have can be overclocked and very easily. So do not be afraid to give it a little bump. GPU is powerful but not super powerful it will handle anything. That would be a good thing to upgrade in a year or so.

Finally cyberpower and ibuypower have a really bad reputation IMHO, and IMO it is mostly because they cut corners on what you will not notice in the specs, the PSU. Cant tell you how many people I know who had their systems give them trouble and the support was horrible.

I'm just going to drop this right here.



In my recent upgrade I threw 32GB at the machine, partially as an experiment. With Chrome and nothing else running, you'll notice that Committed is sitting at 4.3GB. It was a bit higher when the system had pretty freshly booted, but then some stuff got written back out at the system's leisure. You'll also notice that Cached is sitting at 21GB. This is stuff that Windows knows I'll want to use at some point. When I do go to use it, it won't need to be read in from a drive, improving my experience. Then there is 8GB just free at the moment.

Sitting on the desktop with just Chrome open I have seen total Commited reach in to the 11GB range. This is before I've even thought about loading a game.

What does this tell us? Well, 32GB is currently a bit overkill, with 24GB as the current ideal. Long-term though it just made more sense to dump all the ram in now. 16GB would also be a very acceptable amount of ram. Windows would still have 12GB to cache stuff with. Most importantly though, nothing would have to be dumped back to disk when the user wants to run something new. There is still plenty of space for Windows to instantly dump a bit of mispredicted cache and fill it with new data.

Here's where it gets interesting. Running 8GB means wasting IO. First, with only 3.5GB for caching, the new thing you want to run probably isn't already in ram. This means waiting for it to read in, effecting your experience. On a 2GB game you'll be okay loading in without too much dumping back out to the swapfile, but only for a bit. Windows really does want to keep some ram open for new stuff, so even though 4.3+2.0 only equals 6.3GB Windows is still going to dump stuff to your swap. While you are trying to play a game. Ugh. Oh, you'll have to wait for that dumped data to read back in too, when you are done with that game for that session. Double-ugh.

What happens when you have 11GB Committed on an 8GB system? Ah, crap. 4GB of data is already dumped to your swapfile on disk. Now you want to read in a 4GB game? Ha! Alright, now we're waiting for 4GB to write out at the same time 4GB is reading in. This is dog slow.

So, as I've repeatedly said, 8GB is starving a machine to death. 16GB is a reasonable amount and certainly the best value. 24GB is roughly ideal, but ram is cheap, why not dump in all 32GB if you're already populating the board with 4 sticks?

Anybody telling you that 8GB is great and 16GB is overkill or pointless is a person speaking from a place of ignorance. Yes, 8GB works, but by no means is it delivering the experience that even a cheap $40 more worth of ram will give you at 16GB. Not knowing that you are starving your machine is not the same as not starving your machine.
Edited by darklordjames - 1/1/13 at 8:53pm

I would say you need to manually adjust your page file. Rule of thumb is memory in machine multiplied by 1.5. So at 8gb you should have a 12gb page file.

If you let windows manage your page file it's ok, but not ideal...

I'm not going to debate the GB thing, but for gaming its all video/CPU/hard disk for loading maps.

8gb is plenty.

Alright, 1996 has now let us know its opinion. Do you also have any data to share from this millennium?

The idea behind manually adjusting your page file and making it 1-2x your ram size was to have a single, large, non-fragmented swap file at the beginning of your disk where reads are fastest. Letting Windows manage the page file meant that over time the file could become fragmented as the page grew and shrunk. In February of 1999 when we shifted to the NT core with Win2000, and by extension NTFS, that became much less of an issue. With SSDs? Fragmentation and drive file position is not a concern. Your "rule of thumb" is irrelevant and has been for more than a decade.

Now, tell me. What reads in faster? A file off a 50MBps HDD, a file off a 500MBps SSD, or data that is already in ram so it doesn't need to be read? What about if that data just needs to shuffle around and can do such at 8000MBps because it's already in ram? I don't know about the math that you guys use, but my math says that 8000 is bigger than 50 or 500.

I know, I know. Me and my numbers and reason. Lunacy!

So. I love storage conversations and their misconceptions. Extensive testing has been done to determine where most of modern computing takes place in regard to storage. The results were that the majority of computing time small block random read is where the action is, an overwhelming majority actually. This is exactly why adding an ssd is an upgrade you really "feel". During this random reading ssds access time is many orders of magnitude faster than spinners. (as I'm sure many of you know)

In regards to gaming data in ram it has been my experience that for the majority of games using a ram disk or simply having an excess of ram gives a marginal improvement to ssd at best. However, when you start adding high res textures to already ram hungry games a large amount of ram can be a huge boost. For those of you who play skyrim, a completely tricked out skyrim with all current high res mods will be significantly bottle-necked with 4gb system ram. If you think 4gb "runs it fine" please add another 4gb and watch your framerate increase to silky smooth levels.

I ran 8x256gb crucial c300s in raid-0 on an lsi 9260 for awhile, good times.

"In regards to gaming data in ram it has been my experience that for the majority of games using a ram disk or simply having an excess of ram gives a marginal improvement to ssd at best."

SSDs still cost too much to store game data on them. Most of us have shifted to something like an OS SSD with a giant platter drive or two for our Steam folder. That path still makes the most sense in cost/performance terms. Also in cost/performance terms, an excess of ram makes a ton more sense than a giant (but still tiny by platter standards) SSD by itself does.

As for marginal improvement? Pff! Tell that to my 32GB of ram, Skyrim, and Team Fortress 2. When I shift to a new game, such as from TF2 to Skyrim, loads take maybe 30 seconds to boot the game. As the days pass and Windows notices that I'm playing a lot of Skyrim, it then makes sure to preload more of that title for me. Load times drop in to the six second range after about four days. Suddenly kicking in to a TF2 binge, Windows again notices and acts accordingly. Loads that took 45 seconds the day I installed Windows now take 30 seconds after my Skyrim binge, and take 10 seconds half-a-week later. Loading up a Mann vs Machine map, where everybody starts their loads at the same time from the lobby, I am consistently the first person in to the map, picking my class and setting up.

Again, 32GB is a bit overkill. 16GB really is the sweet-spot at this moment. 8GB though? Windows has to dump crap to swap to load anything and has jack-all precached. On 8GB your machine is starving to death. 8x400MBps drives in RAID 0? You know what's faster than that? Having your data in ram before you even knew you wanted it. The extra cost? $40. $120 if you want to go a little nuts and splurge on 32GB.

Again with my lunatic "math", but "zero" is less than "any amount of time". I'll take $120 for "zero" over $1600 for "some time" any day of the week.