More upgrades

About 6 months ago, I upgraded the CPU in my home computer. I got a much faster CPU, but most importantly, I got much more memory. As a result, I can do more on that computer. But I found out very quickly that I don’t have enough storage space. And everybody knows current SSD prices. I don’t mind spending this money. I just don’t want to pay $400 dollars for something that I spent $170 18 months ago.

But then I remembered that some time ago, I upgraded the SSD for my relative from 512 GB to 1 Tb and I kept the old one. It is an NVMe drive, and after I plugged it in, I found that it is actually faster than my old Samsung SATA SSD drive. It was like a gift from above because it is exactly the space I needed.

This also allows me to move all my development to that disk and free up disk space on my main drive. Just a note: any SSD needs to have around 10% of its space free. This allows the controller to have great freedom in leveling wear on flash memory.

Everything was nice, but later I found out the next constraint: memory. Even though I got 32 GB, it wasn’t enough for serious work. I typically use 2 browsers: one for serious work and to log in to sensitive sites, and a second to browse the internet and to watch videos. Each of them consume enourmous amount of memory.

I also have a game that runs more or less constantly. I have 2 Visual Studio instances that have quite big projects. Sometimes I run our application for testing, and sometimes this application consumes over 20 GB of memory. I often see Commit Memory in Task Manager go over 45 GB of memory and sometimes close to 60.

But there is no point in buying DDR4 memory because it is an obsolete platform, so I just manage memory manually and close browsers and the game when I need more memory. Inconvenient, but this is part of life.

This weekend, I sat in the morning and thought about what to do. I was angry at AI companies. I was thinking about buying a brand-new computer that will make my life easier, but that computer needs at least 64 GB of memory. And memory alone costs close to $900. Again, I would spend it, but 18 months ago it cost $170-$200. I just don’t like to pay money for nothing.

Then I remembered that some time ago I bought a new computer for my relative, and I kept the old one. It also had DDR4 32 GB of memory, but I totally forgot that it had 2 sticks of 16 GB each. And I got an idea to replace two 8 GB sticks with two 16 GB sticks. I checked with AI, and it looks like it can work.

So that is what I did. I took off modules with SDRAM chips from Nanya and replaced them with Team Group memory modules. I don’t even need to change anything in the BIOS. Obviously, I ran a memory test to make sure that everything ok and everything works just fine.

And today I found that MSI released a non-beta version of my BIOS. I built my computer in 2018, and they still support its motherboard. I will update to that version soon. In any case, this company earned my respect today.

Also, running 48 Gb in dual-channel with command rate 1 is also impressive. I don’t know who is responsible here: MSI or AMD, but I’m glad that in 2018 I made the right decision and used the AMD platform. It saved me a lot of money.

I hope it helps someone.