Suggestions on how to build a DIY Mini-Computer

[RedBackman]

3 hours ago, GrandPapillon said:

nope, not even close. Swap file is 256MB and no swapping, full 4GB used

 

Win10 dramatically changed the way it manages RAM and swap, not like before

 

I have limited my SWAP to 256MB on 4 partitions, and never swap above 1GB

What sort of workload do you have if you're not swapping at all with just 4GB on Windows 10. Surely not running VM's with any sort of mulitasking, right? Because that's what OP is looking to do.

 

And not to derail the main conversation of finding OP a suitable mini-pc but: if you've only allocated one 256MB block in each four partitions how would you swap over 1GB because the memory manager would just start killing stuff leading to instability and troubles or spitting out errors right? Also are the partitions on separate drives or what is the point of splitting the swap/pagefile? And if you do have that many drives do you not have enough space to increase the swap size more? What would be the point of limiting it to 1GB if you only have 4GB of ram on Windows10? I'm so confused by this setup tbh.

[GrandPapillon]

1 hour ago, RedBackman said:

Surely not running VM's with any sort of mulitasking, right?

I do actually, allocating 600MB to run Linux VMs, works great. Unless you are doing something crazy, 600MB RAM for a Linux WMs is perfectly acceptable. Most people have no clue and oversize everything because they have  no idea what to do. A bit like an Indian tailor oversizing a suit to make sure your fat <deleted> can fit in ????

 

1 hour ago, RedBackman said:

What would be the point of limiting it to 1GB if you only have 4GB of ram on Windows10?

because Win10 is now using RAM instead of swap as the main source of memory, or some applications bypass the swap thing and go direct to RAM, without the OS playing stupid tricks with the Swap. Wouldn't have worked under WinXP or Win7. Found this running some AI project, swap file would stay the same and not grow, yet full RAM was being used. Go figure.

[RedBackman]

7 hours ago, GrandPapillon said:

I do actually, allocating 600MB to run Linux VMs, works great. Unless you are doing something crazy, 600MB RAM for a Linux WMs is perfectly acceptable. Most people have no clue and oversize everything because they have  no idea what to do.

Windows 10 needs about 8GB of ram to spread its wings and get the optimal performance, and it will use about 4GB of that for the OS. It will install on 2GB ram and use ~1GB or on 4GB ram and use ~3GB but it's already limiting itself from the get go. You can see how one 600MB VM on top of 3GB OS doesn't leave much headroom for anything else. The difference in cost from a 4GB to 8GB stick (ddr4 2666) is about ~300 baht, well worth it.

7 hours ago, GrandPapillon said:

 

because Win10 is now using RAM instead of swap as the main source of memory, or some applications bypass the swap thing and go direct to RAM, without the OS playing stupid tricks with the Swap. Wouldn't have worked under WinXP or Win7. Found this running some AI project, swap file would stay the same and not grow, yet full RAM was being used. Go figure.

Win10 always uses physical memory as the main source of memory, it has no other choice. Page files are loaded into physical memory when they are called (hard fault). Swap in general isn't a bad thing either, if the system swaps something and that bit of memory doesn't have any hard faults it's not really taxing your system - it's just freeing up physical memory that you're not using at all.

 

When you run multiple programs that exceed your physical memory then you'll start getting hard faults but your computer will still be mostly usable with a performance hit. You'll mainly notice it when you switch between programs, the inactive program that's paged will take a while to get up to speed each time you switch.

 

The real problem comes when you have one program/process that uses more memory than you physically have available (ie.video editing wants 4GB at once but I only have 2GB physical available) then that memory is going to thrash as it constantly loads paged data to perform the next step causing increased cpu load as well and grinding the system to a halt.

 

But again, none of this is the swap's fault. It's a user trying to do too much with too little. The solution is either do less or get more physical ram. The benefits of having an appropriate-sized pagefile is that you can do more with less and you usually have time to at least save before closing stuff if you reach the point where it's bogged down. The disadvantages of having too large of a pagefile is only wasted disk space which isn't that big of a deal. The disadvantages of having too small of a pagefile are much worse - inconsistency, program crashes, flat out not being able to do things, etc.

 

As for whether you should have a pagefile on an SSD - modern ones are large enough, cheap enough, and have enough read/write cycles that it shouldn't be a major concern regardless. However you should still prefer to have enough physical memory for everything you frequently do so that the pagefile doesn't thrash.

[GrandPapillon]

5 hours ago, RedBackman said:

Windows 10 needs about 8GB of ram to spread its wings and get the optimal performance

Windows had always loved spreading its wings with more RAM, but it seems to be working perfectly fine with 4GB, which surprised me too

 

maybe the RAM on Video Card GPU is being solicited more for heavy UI interactions than the general CPU and RAM

Edited June 11, 2022 by GrandPapillon

[RedBackman]

2 hours ago, GrandPapillon said:

Windows had always loved spreading its wings with more RAM, but it seems to be working perfectly fine with 4GB, which surprised me too

 

maybe the RAM on Video Card GPU is being solicited more for heavy UI interactions than the general CPU and RAM

If you have a GPU the dedicated memory could take some stress off your system memory for tasks that it handles but it isn't used like additional system memory - meaning your swap size has nothing to do with it. If you're showing 4/4GB ram usage you're already full and additional things should be going into compressed memory which is a fast pagefile or into the pagefile on your drives. Anytime that's not happening you're still giving up performance, just the memory manager is killing things that would be probably be better off paged. At first you might not even notice because it tries to take the low hanging fruit but as you use more ram you're more more likely to kill things that have a real effect. Eventually you will get memory issues like programs behaving slower, less consistent, crashing or straight up getting error messages about your memory.

 

If you're not having any noticeable symptoms you're probably just not using enough memory for it to matter but again you wouldn't be worse off with a larger pagefile unless you're running into some really strange edge case or a bug. For most users the difference will be noticeable and the recommendation to spend $10 more to get at least 8GB of ram and avoid the issue completely is easy advice. If you're a real "power user" doing gaming, professional workflows, etc 16GB would be the modern recommendation and if you do something really intense like 3D modeling, animation or video editing 32 GB or more.

[GrandPapillon]

I don't have a problem with spending extra for more RAM, I just find it ridiculous to use 8GB for a simple OS doing basic stuff. If I could get away with 1GB RAM, I would ????

 

my WinXP went from 256MB RAM to 1GB RAM over 10 years and everything was run efficiently, and I like it that way

 

giving it more RAM and your Windows will just keep eating it up with stupid process and stupid things. You need to starve that beast ????

 

Edited June 11, 2022 by GrandPapillon

[fdsa]

Why use less RAM if you could use more? Consumer grade RAM is dirt cheap (compared to server RAM) so you could really add few bucks and purchase 8 GB instead of 4 GB or 16 GB instead of 8 GB.

I prefer to simply max out the amount of RAM depending on CPU and Motherboard support.

 

  

On 6/10/2022 at 7:44 PM, GrandPapillon said:

no swapping

this is what real "no swapping" looks like ????

 

 

Edited June 12, 2022 by fdsa

[RedBackman]

13 hours ago, fdsa said:

Why use less RAM if you could use more? Consumer grade RAM is dirt cheap (compared to server RAM) so you could really add few bucks and purchase 8 GB instead of 4 GB or 16 GB instead of 8 GB.

I prefer to simply max out the amount of RAM depending on CPU and Motherboard support.

 

  

this is what real "no swapping" looks like ????

 

 

^ This. It never hurts to go with more RAM but maxing out the amount the motherboard/cpu supports would be a waste of money for most too. Even the cheaper consumer boards these days max at 32GB which is overkill for average users. And in some cases RAM isn't cheap either, like macbook air charging 6000baht for 8GB of soldered ram. ????

[GrandPapillon]

15 hours ago, fdsa said:

 

this is what real "no swapping" looks like ????

 

 

I raise your 1.5GB "no swap" with mine at 2GB ????

 

KiB Mem:   2050468 total,  1927508 used,   122960 free,   209052 buffers
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 used,        0 free,  1522340 cached
 

[fdsa]

8 hours ago, GrandPapillon said:

I raise your 1.5GB "no swap" with mine at 2GB ????

these are megabytes ("-m"), 16 GB total.

[dddave]

When I was building a PC a few years ago, I found the best resource for accurate information to be the REDDIT "buildapc" sub-reddit.  Within that forum are some online tools that you can list the parts you are considering and it will determine compatibility and price comparisons.

No matter what you are trying to build, there will be someone who has done that and the atmosphere is extremely helpful...rarely snark-outs like some other forums I know.

Check it out:  https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/ 

[GrandPapillon]

4 hours ago, fdsa said:

these are megabytes ("-m"), 16 GB total.

right, still I can run a Linux with no swap with only 2GB

 

while you seem to need 16GB to run yours with no swap ????

 

[digbeth]

unless you need the graphics card to game or just enjoy building for the sake of it mini-ITX systems are bad value compared to bare-bones kit like NUC where you just pop in the ram and ssds, -

[connda]

On 6/9/2022 at 3:36 PM, GrandPapillon said:

why would you need 8GB High Performance RAM, just take standard 4GB RAM, works perfectly fine with Win10 and my CPU never reach 100%

I run Linux with VirtualBox and run Windows in a VM.  The addtional RAM is for the VM.