Hey guys

I built my silent PC built two years and it's performing well. 2 years down, I feel the need for certain upgrades. Windows 2008 server (just use it as workstation though with DHCP services) has slowed my system down so I may consider SSD caching or just moving to SSD since it's become quite affordable now. However, the immediate upgrade I think I need is memory. I'm at 8gb currently (Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 Model KVR1333D3N9K2/8G)

Approximately, this is what I run (see attached image too)
Windows 2008 - 2gb
VMware running Ubuntu - 2gb
Outlook, Excel, Word, Ultraedit. 1-2 misc apps - 2gb
Google Chrome with about 20 open tabs - 2gb

Now out of all, Chrome has surprised me with its numbers. I used to use Firefox and it didn't use anywhere that close but Chrome is the fastest and I rely heavily on its extensions so have to stick with it. If I'm not used my VM in a day and get it back to be the active window, it can take 30 seconds to come up and allow me to work on it. I'm guessing this is because it is swapping the paging file data into the RAM. So the question is should I invest in 4-8gb more RAM or simply move the OS to a new SSD disk?

Does anybody know what does 8 gb RAM approximately use in watts?

Thanks!

Varies by DIMM but DDR3 will use 1-2W per DIMM. Peanuts compared to the rest of a typical system.

Kind of amazed that amounts of memory can get used like this. I would be stripping out all of the services and startup applications that you do not need as a start because 2Gb for an OS is crazy.

Have you thought about a extension to tame Chromes memory usage ?
I found this one, The Great Suspender that allows you to suspend a tab manually or after a set amount of time.
If not i would go for more ram before a SSD as even though a SSD will speed things up its still going to be swapping RAM to the page file and back again.
In a ideal world i would get more ram and a SSD but money is tight these days

I am also facing the same issues over it's extension..It is really difficult to end..Is there any other alternatives of it?

Guys - if I may post to the same topic i started, my 5200 HDD seems to have gotten quite noisy over the last few weeks. In the past, I didn't even hear it much but now it seems to be always writing or reading something. it's the Western Digital Caviar Green WD30EZRSDTL 3TB

How should I investigate this? I built this PC to be a silent PC but the HDD isn't allowing that

I did do defragmentation on the disks a week ago and can't say for certain but it may have caused this issue

Thanks

I think you run Windows. Sysinternals (purchased by Microsoft) has free utilities which can tell you what is accessing your drive. If it's a non-Windows VM that's causing the problem, you'll have to use another tool obviously.

Another quick way although it wont tell you what drive, is to use task manager.
Processes tab > View > Select Columns > I/O reads I/O writes, etc.

And that's per stick so two 8GB sticks are more efficient than 4 4GB sticks of you want to keep the power as lower as possible.