RAM Not So Important for Digital Media Editing/Creation?

[Jason Dunn]

I did an experiment with one of my PCs a few months ago, and the results were interesting. Like pretty much every other computer geek on the planet, I thought that 256 MB of RAM in a modern Windows XP computer wasn't enough, 512 MB was "ok", and 1 GB was the sweet spot. When I was putting together a PC, I installed the Veritest Multimedia Content Creation Winstone (http://www.veritest.com/benchmarks/mccwinstone/default.asp) to do some tests. This benchmarking tool installs version of popular digital media content creating tools such as Photoshop, Premiere, Macromedia Director, Flash, Windows Media Encoder 9, and others. The idea is that it's a real-world test of how quickly the PC can do a variety of tasks in these programs - apply filters to photographs, edit and encode video, render 3D objects, etc.. At the end of the benchmark, a number is assigned (in winstones) to represent the overall speed of that computer at the tasks.

The computer in question is my main PC: a Shuttle SB95P2 (http://global.shuttle.com/Product/Barebone/SB95P%20V2.asp) running a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 processor with HyperThreading, and 2 GB of Kingston DDR2 RAM. I varied the amount of RAM, and moved the clock speed of the CPU up and down for these tests. Here are the results:

3.4 Ghz, 1 GB RAM: 29 winstones
3.4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM: 29.2 winstones
3.4 Ghz, 256 MB RAM: 21.3 winstones
2.4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM: 21.3 winstones
2.4 Ghz, 256 MB RAM: 19.9 winstones

Pretty interesting, no? While I wasn't expecting to see a performance jump moving from 1 GB to 2 GB of RAM, I was expecting to see a bigger drop in performance moving from 2 GB down to 256MB. I'm of course in no way suggesting that we all ditch our gobs of RAM, rather, for pure digital media content creation, the CPU is far more important than the RAM, so if you're buying a machine for this purpose, shunt as much of your budget towards the CPU as possible. The results also show that if you have a slower CPU, adding more RAM is of little benefit in this scenario - you'd be better of upgrading the CPU.

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Benchmarks don't do anything for me. I upgraded to 1gb of RAM from 512mb because it was starting to be a pain doing complex photo-editing. The computer slows to a crawl the moment it has to hit the hard drive for the swap file.

[Vincent Ferrari]

I'd have to say that from experience, it's 6 of one half a dozen of the other.

Rendering is definitely faster with a faster CPU, but working with the actual video is light years faster with more RAM.

All depends on how you use it, I guess. More editing means you need more RAM. DUmping from camera to HD, a better proc and faster HD would probably serve you better.