Memory Compatibility on a A8N

[RufusKing]

Was planning on getting my new system ordered soon, and was going over the the list a couple of times as you do. The memory I was looking at was 2gb of TwinMOS DDR400 (twister series from what I can tell), as its a good price and I use twinMOS at the moment and its always been good to me.

http://uk.asus.com/products/mb/qvl/A8N-QVL.pdf

The link above is for the A8N series qualified vendors. Does this mean I'm taking a stupid risk going for the two together which could result in me losing a lot of money if it doesnt work? Has anyone used this memory in the MoBo at this quantity? Or does anyone have any better suggestions to fit nicely with a budget of around £230, give or take...

Your help would be much appreciated as always!

-Leonard

[Firelord]

What do you need 2GB of memory for? I thought if you filled all slots on nForce 4 it defualts to 333FSB... maybe wrong

[RufusKing]

Its a audio production studio/mobile PC... memory is pretty crucial to a lot of the processes. I use a hell of a lot of DSP, Software Synthesis and Audio tracks, so I need as much memory as possible. The 2gb is going to be 2 x 1gb sticks, not 4 512mb! The most I would ever put in it is 3gb I imagine, but 2gb is my start point

[Firelord]

I see cool I know that studio stuff is reallllll blood sucker on the mem

It won't oc well because of the denstity of the memory but TwinMOS is a great brand for stabilty

Just becuase its not on the QVL doesn't mean it won't work tbh I should see no problem in running that. Might be worth firing off an email to Asus to see if they can test for you

[Thorsson]

It ought to work, just the timings will be loose compared to the 512Mb sticks. Those QVLs are useless, they're usually about a year out of date.

[RufusKing]

How much looser? RAM timings have never been my strong point when it comes to understanidng components.

[Thorsson]

1Gb sticks are so rare and TwinMOS don't even say what the recommended timings are on their website, so I think you'll have to wait and test. My guess is something like 3-3-3-8 based on what I've seen from other brands.

[RufusKing]

Do you think Gb sticks are a stupid idea or do you have any better recommendations... I'm always open to suggestions from people with more experience in these matters!

It won't oc well because of the denstity of the memory but TwinMOS is a great brand for stabilty

I never tried to OC memory... is it worth it? 400 seems fast enough to me, but i'm never afraid to experiment... one day it will go wrong, but until that day, i'm not afraid to tweak!

[StormPC]

It is highly unlikely that you would gain performance going with 2GB over 1GB with your application. You would gain more performance from faster CPUs and HDDs than additional RAM.

[RufusKing]

I have found in my personal experience on studio systems that the ones with the most amount of memory have always been a lot better at running the applications I need. For example if you are loading up a drum sample set it can take up about 400mb of memory, which leaves little memory for any other processing. Audio software relies heavily on memory for a lot of its working processes!

I'd rather have too much then too little! But thankyou for your advicae as always

[StormPC]

If you really use samples that large (a mistake in my opinion) then you need about 8 gigs of DDR and you should consider a multi-cpu platform like quad Opterons. 2GB ain't gonna cut it. I'd doublecheck my sample sizes however. That sounds way too large for a sample. When you say drum sample you mean a whole kit, right? Surely not just a single drum.

[RufusKing]

Yeah, it is a whole kit, which consists of about 200 samples for an acoustic kit, although I usually use 400 samples in a mix (if I havent recorded a real kit). 400mb is about right for top quality kit, I did say drum sample set btw in the previous post!

I hope 2gb should be enough! I use 512 at the moment in my current mobile system, and that handles a sample set that size, although it doesnt do it comfortabley when you make it run with a lot of other samples!

[RufusKing]

For your curiosity (if you are curious, you may not be!), lets say we have a snare drum. For each key ona keyboard you press to trigger it, it would have say the following samples (on a high end sample set say about)

-Sample of snare from the microphone placed on top
-Sample of snare from the microphone placed on the bottom
-Stereo sample of the drum from a pair of ambient room mics
-Stereo sample from cybal mic pair
-Mono samples from all 4-5 tom drum mics, hi-hat mics, kick mic and any others (all adds to realistic recreation of studio sounds through mic bleeding! No microphone picks up just what its aimed at, especially not on a drum kit!)

Then to make matters worse you have about 4 different sets of samples of all of the above for different strenghts of hits. Light hits, Harder hits, Hard hits, Really hard hits... and to make the sample set even bigger you then get the snare hit in different ways (normal, outer skin, rimshot, roll, and maybe alternatives to all to allow more human sounding results)

A sample set like the one explained there would be about 1gb in size, give or take. This is something I only tend to use slaved on a second computer at the moment becuase of its enormity, but its the kind of thing I am aiming to run on my new machine.

Hope thats given you a bit of insight into the wonderful world of audio sampling! I hope you find it useful, or at least interesting!

[Timmy!!!]

I use norton ghost onto a second hard disk, nice and easy, and data is guaranteed to be there if one drive fails.

[RufusKing]

Thats a really good idea... I'll use that one... cheers!

[Thorsson]

I don't know owt about music samples, but I do know that photo editing is very memory limited, and you just cannot add too much memory. I would imagine that you would need enough for Windows, your programs and all the samples loaded into memory before you ceased to see more improvement by adding memory over faster memory, faster CPUs, etc.

I would suggest is that you have as little running in the background as possible and you might want to turn system recovery off - this made a big speed gain for me running a very large database as Recovery kept making backups.