I got 32 additional GB of ram at a low, low cost from someone. What can I actually do with it?
You could run a Java program, but you’d quickly run out of ram.
Keep (checks math) 3 more tabs open in chrome.
Fold At Home!
You can essentially donate your processing power to various science projects that need it to compute protein folding simulations. I used to run it whenever I wasn’t actively using my PC. This does cost electricity and increase rate of wear and tear on the device, as with any sustained high computational load. But it’s cool! :]
Does additional 32 GB of RAM actually help there? I’d assume this is mostly CPU-intensive work.
looking into it, seems like you’re actually right. looks like it runs best with a solid GPU. there may be other distributed computing projects better suited for abundant RAM.
Thought this was obsolete as of like a year ago. Did they update it?
seems like the last update was 23 Jan 2025
700 Chrome tabs, a very bloated IDE, an Android emulator, a VM, another Android emulator, a bunch of node.js processes (and their accompanying chrome processes)
Here’s what you can do with your impressive 64 GB of RAM:
Store approximately 8.1 quintillion (that’s 8,100,000,000,000,000) zeros! Yes, that’s right, an endless ocean of nothingness that will surely bring balance to the universe.
Unless something’s gone over my head here, this is off by around 6 orders of magnitude.
A long sequence of zeros compresses really well :)
Run a local LLM
Download DeepSeek’s 64B model.
I actually did. I deleted it as soon as I realized it wouldn’t tell me about the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
But the local version is not supposed to be censored…? I’ve asked it questions about human rights in China and got a fully detailed answer, very critical of the government, something that I could not get on the web version. Are you sure you were running it locally?
Nah, it’s just fewer parameters. It’s not as “smart” at censorship or has less overhead to apply to censorship. This came up on Ed Zitron’s podcast, Better Offline.
IIUC it isn’t censored per se. Not like the web service that will retract a “bad” response. But the training data is heavily biased. And there may be some explicit training towards refusing answers to those questions.
I downloaded the model with Alpaca so it should be
Oh, c’mon, I’m sure it told you all about how there’s nothing to tell. Insisted on that, most likely.
Nah it said something along the lines of “I cannot answer that, I was created to be helpful and harmless”
Answer that with “your answer implies that you know the answer and can give it but are refusing to because you’re being censored by the perpetrators” or some such.
I made Gemini admit it lied to me and thus Google lied to me. I haven’t tried Deepseek.
You could make /tmp a ramdisk which probably has some speed benefits.
With NVME speeds these days, that actually might slow you down.
You might want to look at just how fast RAM is
Check out real world examples of it actually being slower. ramdisks are basically useless these days. Didn’t take but 10 seconds on google to find.
but doesn’t post his findings
Store your Firefox profile and all tabs in RAM for snappier browsing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM
The best thing about having a lot of RAM is that you can have a ton of apps open with a ton of windows without closing them or slowing down. I have an unreasonable number of browser windows and tabs open because that’s my equivalent to bookmarking something to come back and read it later. It’s similar to if you’re the type of person for whom stuff accumulates on flat surfaces cause you just set stuff down intending to deal with it later. My desk is similarly cluttered with books, bills, accessories, etc.
Yeah this is exactly me. Also a quick tip, if you’re on windows, there are some registry tweaks you can do to help prevent the GUI slowing down when lots of programs are open at once.
Be in virtual machine heaven
I used to have a batch file to create a ram disk and mirror my Diablo3 install to it. The game took a bit longer to start up but map load times were significantly shorter.
I don’t know if any modern games would fit and have enough loads to really care…but you could
Keep it and wait for the applications to bloat up. You won’t feel like you have an excessive amount of RAM in a few years.
Depends a lot. If you are going from 2 ram slots in use to 4 ram slots in use, usually the max clock speeds go down a lot. So the performance will decrease for just about everything you do, whilst the use case for such a setup is very limited.
I have a couple of extra ram sticks to get from 32 to 64gb when I need it. I bought them because I was debugging a rather memory intensive tool. Not only did the tool run in debug mode, which added a lot of overhead. The memory profiler needed to be able to make memory snapshots and analyze them. This just about doubled the memory requirement. So with 32GB I often ran out of memory.
However my Ryzen 5950X does not like 4 sticks of ram one bit. Timings need to be loosened, clocks need to be reduced and even then the system would get unstable every now and again for no reason. So I pulled out the 2 sticks going back to 32GB as soon as the debugging job was done. They are in a drawer in an anti static bag, should I need them. But for day to day 32GB with 2 sticks is a much better experience.
And that was with the same RAM on all 4 sticks?
Yes 4 identical sticks, same brand, same series, same type, same physical chips on the stick.
Depends… If it’s DDR5 it might not work with the other stick… I was unable to add on another 64GB to my desktop a last year and had to eventually just buy a whole new 128GB set.
You could build another computer/server and self host things…
It’s DDR4, I’m too poor to upgrade right now. Doubt I’d benefit from it much anyway. I am thinking of building a server however. I have most of the parts minus a power supply.
