RAM

[brianvoe]

im the type of person that uses alot of dynamic simulations and i was wondering how much ram i should get and a little overview on exactly what ram does in terms of performance.

[pao008]

i use 1gig but to be safe for dynamic simulation use 2gig or above..Ram boost your pc performance....you may also want a good videocard Geforce or maybe a quadro fx if you have some spare money.

[sriram viswanathan]

Hi,
since u have asked a overview.. i m explaining these stuff to my observation and knowledge.....
some memory types.. permanent ( HDD) and main memory (RAM)

its true that the amount of Main memory is proportional to the performance of the pc.. Main memory or the RAM is a volatile memory which stores all the information of the ur current work/work related files/their dumps/cache's etc... when u switch off ur pc, all data from the ram erases... there are many types of Main memory .. SD RAM, DDR RAM, RD RAM, MRAM etc... DDR is cheaper and cool in performance..

when u boot os or open notepad/maya or render stuff etc, ram 's memory is used.. only when u click 'save' button or when there is a autosave in progress, the HDD is used... the hard drive is slower to be used by the processor for processing information, so the processor uses L1 cache and L2 cache which is the fastest memory in pc..the L1 and L2 cache has all the temp information for the processer to process... the motherboard takes the information from the ram to the L1 and L2 caches... but L1 and L2 have small sizes like 2 MB or 1 MB.... so when buying a processor, motherboard - we also need to check for the support of RAM and its speeds.. L 1 and L2 cache size etc...

the 7200 rpm HDD is much slower when compared to a DDR RAM 400 Mhz.. even SATA HDD is slower compared to 400 Mhz DDR RAM.. so RAM is a quick storage place which can be used by the pc to store bulk information for some time.. but there is something called as Paging file which we allocate in our HDD which is virtual RAM .. when the application realises that there is no more memory left in the main memory .. the paging file space is used which avoids many issues such as file crashes, etc..

I too use 1 Gig of RAM @ home for normal learning and stuff..

but there are few other things which matter too..

type of processor & the processor speed, L1 cache L2 cache... ,
size of ram and ram speed - (i guess i have 400 Mhz DDR Ram)
motherboard speed and support .. etc..

above all the sycronization of these components one with another.. usually in branded pc's the components are picked so that the overall performance of the machine is best for the given specifications..

but generally people prefer to assemble their own pc(me too) and end up with a slower performance, even with a better configuration....

If your board supports more RAM .. then u can go upto 4 Gigs... which is good for dynamic simulations... etc...

video card processes all the video information ... a geforce 256 MB or 512 MB video with good processing speeds will be good enought for ur requirement...

:)

[Nojoy]

I found out that some scenes I have will stall my mashine when it comes to rendering out the sequence. In some cases I even have to close maya and render the mashine from the command prompt to free resources.

I would advise at least 2 gig of ram for dynamic simulations, especially when it comes to rendering heavy scenes, or the mashine will die on you eventually. Luckily Maya 8 is coming soon with a 64bit version as well wich should let the processors and gpu take care of alot in the future, freeing up some ram for other stuff. Thought I'd share my experiences with ram and maya, hope this helped a bit aswell. ;)