Recently, a fan had a sudden thought: if the computer’s RAM is insufficient, why not increase the virtual memory instead of upgrading the physical RAM (memory stick)? Wouldn’t the extra hundreds of dollars be better spent on food and drinks?
Well… even in 2024, many might still have this idea. While it’s not completely unreasonable, it’s merely a temporary fix.
The existence of virtual memory is justified; some computers encounter minor issues without properly configured virtual memory.
Virtual memory allows programs to access memory space beyond the physical RAM capacity and temporarily stores infrequently used data on the hard drive, thereby improving system memory utilization and overall performance. This technology makes applications believe they have continuous available memory, while in reality, this memory is often fragmented into multiple pieces of physical RAM, with some temporarily stored on external disk storage for data swapping when needed.
However, virtual memory cannot truly replace physical RAM; otherwise, what’s the point of having RAM at all?
This fan’s computer has only 4GB of RAM.
If we directly allocate 16GB to Windows, making a total of 20GB, wouldn’t that be better?
Once submitted, the total here would be 20GB+.
That should be enough, right? For general applications, it’s generally fine, but for software that requires high memory read/write speeds, the computer will respond very slowly.
Now, the main text begins. The virtual memory in a computer is mostly managed automatically, meaning the system calculates and configures the virtual memory needed at the moment, requiring little manual intervention.
The basic functions of virtual memory are:
- Virtual memory is a memory management mechanism provided by the operating system for applications.
- When RAM is insufficient, the operating system transfers infrequently used data to a specific area on the hard drive, marking it as virtual memory.
- Through virtual memory, the system can run multiple applications within limited physical memory, enhancing concurrency and performance.
In other words: the read/write speed of RAM far exceeds that of solid-state drives (SSDs).
This brings us to the RAM read/write speeds; this fan’s RAM is DDR3 1600MHz 4GB.
Calculating it, the theoretical read/write speed for a single-channel 1600MHz RAM stick is 12.8GB/s, and for dual-channel, it’s 25.6GB/s.
The theoretical maximum bandwidth can be calculated with the formula: Bandwidth = Actual Frequency × Transfer Count × Bus Width / 8.
Regarding SSD read/write speeds:
- SATA SSDs have read/write speeds up to 550MB/s.
- PCIe 3.04 SSDs have read/write speeds up to 3500MB/s. On motherboards that only support DDR3 RAM, the PCI lanes available are only PCIe 3.016. It’s recommended to use four PCIe 3.04 SSDs combined with a PCIe 3.016 expansion card to set up a RAID array, which might outperform the RAM’s read/write speeds. But… the costs would be enormous.
After reading this, do you really think increasing Windows’ virtual memory means you can skip upgrading physical RAM?
–End– If it needs upgrading, just upgrade it.
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