$1000 USD CAD and Rendering Workhorse. Getting the Balance right?

[Mr. Scram]

Well if you have an actual use for it fair enough. Last time I was asking for advice for my new machine built 7 months ago I had people claiming to be experts and claiming that 64GB on any machine was a must. I am still iusing 16GB like the old machine and can run 3D CAD with lots of browser tabs and circuit studio running as well.

Even 8 GB is very workable. It's better to have more, but you can definitely get some real work done with it. Running a proper CAD package and Photoshop next to each other isn't a big ask.

[beanflying]

Sitting at just on 6GB memory use with Fusion open on a fairly simple model and 4 open Firefox tabs. Windoze combined tasks would be maybe a third of that 

I thinks that while 8GB 'works' due to lazy and more powerful code its days are numbered if you want to do more than browse the web or single tasks.

[Mr. Scram]

Sitting at just on 6GB memory use with Fusion open on a fairly simple model and 4 open Firefox tabs. Windoze combined tasks would be maybe a third of that 

I thinks that while 8GB 'works' due to lazy and more powerful code its days are numbered if you want to do more than browse the web or single tasks.

The new Firefox architecture seems to eat more RAM than it used to. I've done rather complicated things within 8 GB, but as I said it's better to have more.

[Simon]

Well if you have an actual use for it fair enough. Last time I was asking for advice for my new machine built 7 months ago I had people claiming to be experts and claiming that 64GB on any machine was a must. I am still iusing 16GB like the old machine and can run 3D CAD with lots of browser tabs and circuit studio running as well.

Even 8 GB is very workable. It's better to have more, but you can definitely get some real work done with it. Running a proper CAD package and Photoshop next to each other isn't a big ask.

Indeed, I have a small touchscreen laptop with 8GB that also runs with no virtual memory. Granted I con't use it as a workhorse but it's not meant to be my engineering workstation just a portable machine for use on the go. I'd not go less than 8GB though.

[Mr. Scram]

Indeed, I have a small touchscreen laptop with 8GB that also runs with no virtual memory. Granted I con't use it as a workhorse but it's not meant to be my engineering workstation just a portable machine for use on the go. I'd not go less than 8GB though.

The Surface Pro line up had a 4 GB model up to the current generation. This model was and still is fairly popular in the enterprise world and there are a a lot of people working with them without issues. Microsoft is obviously thinking about longevity and possibly future features in Windows 10 and has now finally upgraded all models to at least 8 GB. Systems can be fairly frugal if they have to although you obviously start depending on virtual memory more and more.

[Simon]

Yea, virtual memory, the old fashioned waf of saying that "this system is now useless and needs to be tossed out". Virtual memory was fine in the old days when we had no option and the proccessors were slower and single core. These days relying on virtual memory is stupid and if you are going to use virtual memory you may as well toss the CPU out and get a cheaper one and use the difference for the RAM because that will actually be faster with a mechanical drive. Mechanical drives have not gone up in speed much and if you want to use your nice expensive SSD as RAM and ruin it's life span you may as well spend the money on more RAM.

[wraper]

Yea, virtual memory, the old fashioned waf of saying that "this system is now useless and needs to be tossed out". Virtual memory was fine in the old days when we had no option and the proccessors were slower and single core. These days relying on virtual memory is stupid and if you are going to use virtual memory you may as well toss the CPU out and get a cheaper one and use the difference for the RAM because that will actually be faster with a mechanical drive. Mechanical drives have not gone up in speed much and if you want to use your nice expensive SSD as RAM and ruin it's life span you may as well spend the money on more RAM.

If you have SSD (which you certainly should), virtual memory is not that bad at all.

[Simon]

If you have SSD (which you certainly should), virtual memory is not that bad at all.

Performance will be "ggod" but SSD's are not designed to be used as RAM, I value my data. Right tool for the job and all that.

[wraper]

If you have SSD (which you certainly should), virtual memory is not that bad at all.

Performance will be "ggod" but SSD's are not designed to be used as RAM, I value my data. Right tool for the job and all that.

IMO it's less evil than windows 8/10 by default not shutting down completely and sort of hibernating instead. The most stupid part is that it makes shutdown way slower but boot is not noticeably faster if at all when you use SSD, not HDD. FWIW you need to do something quite extreme to wear out flash memory in SSD. Almost all SSD failures are not related to exceeding write limit of NAND FLASH.

[Mr. Scram]

Yea, virtual memory, the old fashioned waf of saying that "this system is now useless and needs to be tossed out". Virtual memory was fine in the old days when we had no option and the proccessors were slower and single core. These days relying on virtual memory is stupid and if you are going to use virtual memory you may as well toss the CPU out and get a cheaper one and use the difference for the RAM because that will actually be faster with a mechanical drive. Mechanical drives have not gone up in speed much and if you want to use your nice expensive SSD as RAM and ruin it's life span you may as well spend the money on more RAM.

Wearing out your SSD has never been an issue in the real world with anything remotely resembling a sane workload. People were very worried about this when SSDs were new and were frantically turning off page files and whatnot, but it turns out it doesn't make a difference. The big vendors don't seem to configure the systems they sell with SSDs any differently either. Virtual RAM works fine, especially if it's an occasional workload. NVMe obviously does the job even better.

[beanflying]

Interesting read seems 'some' B450 and 470 MB's could be made to run PCIe4 with a Bios update. Way to 'speed up' your virtual memory 

Speaking of B450 boards mine arrived late yesterday. Ordered from a medium sized Perth Company and Shipped direct to me from a Melbourne warehouse 3,500 road km's away. Home many European countries apart would that be ?

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ryzen-3000-asus-opens-up-pcie-4-support-for-selected-x470-and-b450-boards.html

[Simon]

Interesting read seems 'some' B450 and 470 MB's could be made to run PCIe4 with a Bios update. Way to 'speed up' your virtual memory 

Are you serious? the interface is always faster than the actual storage.

[Simon]

Wearing out your SSD has never been an issue in the real world with anything remotely resembling a sane workload. People were very worried about this when SSDs were new and were frantically turning off page files and whatnot, but it turns out it doesn't make a difference. The big vendors don't seem to configure the systems they sell with SSDs any differently either. Virtual RAM works fine, especially if it's an occasional workload. NVMe obviously does the job even better.

Why would a PC retailer make deliberate change to default windows settings that make the machine last longer? By default windows also defragments the drive in the background.

[wraper]

Interesting read seems 'some' B450 and 470 MB's could be made to run PCIe4 with a Bios update. Way to 'speed up' your virtual memory 

Are you serious? the interface is always faster than the actual storage.

PCI-E 3.0 x4 is already a limiting factor for fastest drives from a few years ago. Read speed is as high as interface speed. Upcoming PCI-E 4.0 drives are way faster than 3.0 interface, though their controllers run very hot.

[wraper]

Why would a PC retailer make deliberate change to default windows settings that make the machine last longer? By default windows also defragments the drive in the background.

It doesn't run defragmentation on SSD. And on HDD it actually prolongs it's life.

[Mr. Scram]

Why would a PC retailer make deliberate change to default windows settings that make the machine last longer? By default windows also defragments the drive in the background.

Warranty and support contracts. Reduced longevity will inevitably land in their lap before the hardware is replaced naturally. Windows detects SSDs and turns defragmentation off, unless you're a fossil running Vista. I don't know why people here seem to insist on stories how the man is out to get them. He might be but not in the manner portrayed. 

https://www.howtogeek.com/256859/dont-waste-time-optimizing-your-ssd-windows-knows-what-its-doing/

[nctnico]

Yea, virtual memory, the old fashioned waf of saying that "this system is now useless and needs to be tossed out". Virtual memory was fine in the old days when we had no option and the proccessors were slower and single core. These days relying on virtual memory is stupid and if you are going to use virtual memory you may as well toss the CPU out and get a cheaper one and use the difference for the RAM because that will actually be faster with a mechanical drive. Mechanical drives have not gone up in speed much and if you want to use your nice expensive SSD as RAM and ruin it's life span you may as well spend the money on more RAM.

Wearing out your SSD has never been an issue in the real world with anything remotely resembling a sane workload. People were very worried about this when SSDs were new and were frantically turning off page files and whatnot, but it turns out it doesn't make a difference. The big vendors don't seem to configure the systems they sell with SSDs any differently either. Virtual RAM works fine, especially if it's an occasional workload. NVMe obviously does the job even better.

This is a meaningless claim without specifying the lifetime expectance the vendors aim for (probably 3 or 4 years of office use). The fact is that an SSD has a limited number of write operations and the data needs to be refreshed too. And thus enabling virtual memory will decrease the life on an SSD (especially on Windows which seems to put stuff into virtual memory even when it isn't necessary at all). Another consideration is whether it is useful to have several GB as virtual memory on an SSD. It will be 100 times slower than the system memory (even with a very fast SSD) so the computer will slow down to a crawl anyway. I'm baffled that Windows still enables virtual memory on a machine with several GB of memory. There is no upside to using virtual memory due to the speed impact. Needless to say I always disable virtual memory to get the best performance from a computer.

[Mr. Scram]

This is a meaningless claim without specifying the lifetime expectance the vendors aim for (probably 3 or 4 years of office use). The fact is that an SSD has a limited number of write operations and the data needs to be refreshed too. And thus enabling virtual memory will decrease the life on an SSD (especially on Windows which seems to put stuff into virtual memory even when it isn't necessary at all). Another consideration is whether it is useful to have several GB as virtual memory on an SSD. It will be 100 times slower than the system memory (even with a very fast SSD) so the computer will slow down to a crawl anyway. I'm baffled that Windows still enables virtual memory on a machine with several GB of memory. There is no upside to using virtual memory due to the speed impact. Needless to say I always disable virtual memory to get the best performance from a computer.

Various independent parties have done their own testing and the results have consistently been that it's pretty much impossible to wear an SSD out. They'll wear out eventually but people needn't worry about it any more than any of their other components wearing out. More importantly, bigger SSDs can handle more writes before running into trouble and the sizes are still increasing quickly. Wearing out an SSD eventually before the computer has become obsolete is unlikely even with silly workloads.

It should be noted NVMe drives are not as quick as RAM but are still pretty good. It cannot be compared to the good old days when virtual RAM would end up on spinning drives which indeed meant that everything crawled to a near halt. Modern NVMe drives actually have throughput similar to DDR2, so it's going to be far from outright terrible. Regardless, disabling the virtual memory is going to be worse than using a NVMe drive for it.  If a computer runs into a situation where it needs virtual memory things aren't going to be better when it's not available. Slower memory is better than denying it the memory it needs outright. Errors instead instead of somewhat reduced performance are the likely scenario. Added to that is that Windows and various applications depend on virtual memory and disabling it throws these applications for a loop. The ideal situation would be a system which has enough memory to deal with regular situations and has the option of virtual memory on those more rare occasions more is needed. This prevents you from needing to load up your system with memory for those 5 times you may need it.

TLDR Windows knows what it's doing and people have been panicking because they weren't familiar with a new technology. Your SSD will be fine.

[SiliconWizard]

I would also never put virtual memory on SSDs, especially if I know it's going to be used frequently! And if it's not, there is no point in enabling virtual memory IMO. Kinda case closed. On a typical desktop computer with 32GB+ RAM, you're likely never going to need it at this point unless one of your apps is leaking memory badly... Of course there is no definite answer for all. Your specific use case may require enabling virtual memory so you're certain you never lose any work, if you're using extremely heavy apps such as very high-res photo processing and such, or very heavy simulations.

As to wearing out, even though flash memory tech has improved significantly and write algorithms too, it still has a relatively low number of write cycles before wearing out, so reliability depends a lot on the write algorithms and how they can spread out data and move it around (wear levelling). A "normal workload" doesn't mean much. There is a gigantic difference between a basic user browsing the internet and writing some Word documents, and another heavier user (but still not exceptional) that will record and edit a lot of videos for instance. A difference that can be 10x or 100x more. So whatever normal means... Write algorithms that spread data out have improved drastically, but they are no miracle either. I don't know whether SSD failures these days are mostly due to flash wearing out or other causes. I'd be interested in seeing real and dependable statistics, because what we read most here (and elsewhere) is that it just doesn't happen, but not based on real figures. Another frequent cause as I know is data corruption not due to wear-out but due to a controller's bug rendering data impossible to access. Controllers have become so sophisticated that this kind of bugs are bound to happen occasionally, and it's a significant cause of failure as I've seen.

The point that "Windows knows what it's doing" - I'm not sure how to take this. I can't help finding it funny. What I have observed though is that even when you have ample RAM and are nowhere near actually needing virtual memory, if it's enabled, the swap file will be written to on a regular basis (and leading to huge fragmentation on HDDs, even again when the OS would never actually need it). That was up to Windows 7 and back when I had not disabled it yet and was still using HDDs. Maybe this has changed in more recent versions.

Of course on servers, that can be another story. Disabling virtual memory may not be an option at all. But many or most servers these days still run on HDDs and not SSDs as I reckon.

[Mr. Scram]

We've all heard all the reasons why SSDs may be written to bits and these all have been discussed to death in the years since they first emerged, but reality isn't showing them to have much merit. Even with stupidly excessive workloads a 100 times more intensive than regular ones. That really is case closed. We all panicked over nothing and it's time to face reality and move on.

Real life testing has shown that all SSDs so far can write vastly more than their specification sheets promise. Small drives have shown to be able to endure hundreds of TB and even petabytes of writes. Unless you're trying to intentionally write that much it's simply not going to happen. Virtual RAM isn't going to make a dent. As has been discussed larger drives are inherently more durable. Everything we've seen in the real world seems to indicate SSDs aren't more fragile than their spinning counterparts, which have different failure modes but fail as well.

Modern day Windows does know what it's doing with drives. It uses a page files when available an appropriate. Don't expect to understand all the optimisations made. Defragmentation on spinning drives isn't very relevant any more as Windows defragments them automatically and in the background and it has been doing that for a while. Running servers from SSDs is commonplace nowadays, although it's mostly done in places where it really helps performance. Some services advertise with running their servers from SSDs.

https://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment/

[mnementh]

The AORUS X570 gaming boards are currently advertising capacity to actually run dual nvme SSDs in RAID0. Obviously this is aimed at non-mission-critical gaming builds where reliability comes second to performance; however I rarely run the same boot drive(s) for more than a year or two anyways, so I'm not afraid of RAID0 on my daily driver either. Have done it oodles of times.




"Dual PCIe 4.0 SSD in RAID 0: Extreme Performance with PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe PCIe SSDs

X570 AORUS motherboards offer the industry's best compatibility in terms of NVMe storage for users who demand high capacity and seek the best performance. AORUS' unique design can be configured in RAID for record speeds of up to 9534 MB/s (Sequential Read), making AORUS the obvious choice for the ultimate PC."

NewEgg Aorus Elite X570 MB Advert: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813145160

Just imagining what these will run like with drives designed from the ground up for pcie4.0 makes me smile. 

mnem
*back into my cave*

[Mr. Scram]

I can't wait for the real world benchmarks showing little to no practical benefit. But sure, you get to flaunt big numbers and us engineering folks know big numbers are better even when they show no tangible benefits other than inflating your e-go.

[Simon]

Why would a PC retailer make deliberate change to default windows settings that make the machine last longer? By default windows also defragments the drive in the background.

Warranty and support contracts. Reduced longevity will inevitably land in their lap before the hardware is replaced naturally. Windows detects SSDs and turns defragmentation off, unless you're a fossil running Vista. I don't know why people here seem to insist on stories how the man is out to get them. He might be but not in the manner portrayed. 

https://www.howtogeek.com/256859/dont-waste-time-optimizing-your-ssd-windows-knows-what-its-doing/

The last installs I did of 10 I had to turn it off. It's not that anyone is out to get anyone. Microsoft never lift a finger to change anything unless they have to. Windows is full of "legacy" stuff. I am sure that the SSD will last the warranty period (1-2 years) I aim to run a machine for 5-7 years.

[David Hess]

I have not reached the write limit of any SSDs yet but have had new ones return corrupted unwritten data because of poor retention time.

[mnementh]

I can't wait for the real world benchmarks showing little to no practical benefit. But sure, you get to flaunt big numbers and us engineering folks know big numbers are better even when they show no tangible benefits other than inflating your e-go.

Yeah,no benefit except booting in 0.7^* seconds. Now multiply that by the number of times you HAVE TO reboot for one reason or another... suddenly very real. And remember, for the purpose these machines are built, you are talking some pretty big executables. _{*random utter BS figure pulled out of my arse for comedic value}
 

Why would a PC retailer make deliberate change to default windows settings that make the machine last longer? By default windows also defragments the drive in the background.

Warranty and support contracts. Reduced longevity will inevitably land in their lap before the hardware is replaced naturally. Windows detects SSDs and turns defragmentation off, unless you're a fossil running Vista. I don't know why people here seem to insist on stories how the man is out to get them. He might be but not in the manner portrayed. 

https://www.howtogeek.com/256859/dont-waste-time-optimizing-your-ssd-windows-knows-what-its-doing/

The last installs I did of 10 I had to turn it off. It's not that anyone is out to get anyone. Microsoft never lift a finger to change anything unless they have to. Windows is full of "legacy" stuff. I am sure that the SSD will last the warranty period (1-2 years) I aim to run a machine for 5-7 years.

It does it automatically if you enable AHCI for the SSD before you install, which DUH.  Also enables and optimizes trim and turns off/hides hibernate. My last 3 builds have been on SSD, did the same every time. 

Nobody runs a machine longer than me. I rarely use the same boot drive longer than 18 months, though my current daily driver build of Windows literally has been upgraded repeatedly wince Win7SP1. IFL FTW, baybee. 

mnem
meh.