How much RAM?
 

I am putting together a new NLE based on my Matrox RT2500...I also used Adobe Aftereffect, Photoshop, and Canopus Imaginate. I am not sure if I will see good performance gain going with 1 Gig of Ram as opposed to 512meg of RAM

Scott

You will get by with 512, but I think you really will notice the difference when you double it. RAM is something like 10 cents a megabyte so it doesn't make sense for that to be your bottleneck.

I have 512 in my current system and I just want to make sure tha the apps will take advantage of the added Ram....ie..Remember that Windows98 only used like 128 megs of Ram effectively. I know that Windows XP makes use of it but I want to make sure that Adobe apps can address that much Ram

Scott

You could turn on the Task Manager in Windows, set it to the performance window and then do some editing. See how much RAM is being consumed. I edit in Premiere 6.0 w/ 1GB DDR and the system uses more than 512 MB while editing, especially while rendering.

Same here, Avid Xpress easily consumes close to 512MB on my system even if it is the only open application (of course there are background services, etc but the only open user application).

I have 2GB of Corsair DDR memory and I've even dedicated a fast 30GB hard drive purely for a page file drive.

2GB RAM, and 30 GB dedicated for a pagefile? Damn, that's a bit overkill, have you checked to see what the memory and pagefile usage is like during an Avid session? With 2 GB, I'd think windows would never ever need to use the pagefile, and doing so would just decrease overall performance (hard drisk read/writes)....

I feel so 2001. I have 256MB ram and 1HD... but hey, never have any problems (I use vegas).

Placing the pagefile on another disk (as opposed to on a separate partition, which is a misconception to do) helps relieve disk I/O. There is no performance degradation to speak of with a large pagefile unless you count loss of disk space.

But you are right, it is more than adequate. The 30GB drive was an extra drive I had lying around so I decided to slave it as a pagefile drive and for my Ghost images so its not entirely being used just as a page drive - it is in the sense that no files there are routinely accessed.

In response to the original thread, I'd definitely go for 1GB. Check out www.crucial.com. Their prices have dropped, you can buy 512MB DDR for $99 right now for most DDR motherboard models (select your motherboard at the site).