PCA Forums

I just installed a pair of 512 meg corsair xms 3200 into my computer and turned the swap file off!!! dear god is this fast now. I have everything stock at the moment... but ill put the FSB back to 145 and see what happens. How high should i be able to get the FSB? I have stock cooling on my Epox 8RDA+ and soon will have aftermarket North bridge cooler and im gonna move the stock to the south bridge.

Youll still need a swapfile for doom3 and hl2

You DEFINATELY don't want to disable your swap file.

200 fsb with agressive timings, mebbe 220 with relaxed timing if you take care of the heat issues on the mobo

ok ill give it a try.

Could I make my swap file smaller? I have 1 gig of ram, and the max use I have seen is around 500 MB...

It's recommended you make your swap file 1 1/2 times the size of your RAM.

For Photoshop users and if you do video editing I would strongly suggest 2 times the size of your ram.

I personally do not believe that reducing the size of your swap - file if you have a lot of memory - improves performance at all. WinXP & 2K manage swap files very well. I just recommend you make your swap file static instead of dynamic (set the min and amx numbers to the same size, and ideally do it right after installing Windows).

You can experiment with a smaller swap file size if you want to, I just think it's a waste of time. If you have a gig installed then you can try setting it to 500Mb.

Just be warned. The swap file is NOT just used to replace RAM when RAM runs low. Many apps (and possibly some games?) use the swap file for their own purposes.

Some apps require a minimum amount of swap file space or they won't even run.

Some apps (like Photoshop and some video editors) EASILY use all available ram. For instance, if you're working with an image or video file that's larger than available memory (and by definition that will be most video files, although when I work on a big Photoshop project I eat up 1Gig easy too) then the app will rely on the swap file. If your swap file is too small, performance will suffer or the app may crash.

Photoshop crashing during a big project would not be very cool..

Thanks, I should probably set it to 2048 then?

well.. so far i havent run into that problem yet. and i can run every game i play wiht out it. but when i do run into a problem ill know to turn it back on.

I use 1500 myself (1.5x) and I do video editing and I'm a heavy Photoshop user. Works okay for me.

This page makes a case for using a 2x swap file for video editing: http://www.slashcam.de/artikel/Tips/TWE ... tml#tweaks

The BIG difference I've found is to specify the mix and max paging files size as the same number. That way Windows won't dynamically resize the swap file.

Here's the relevant section from that article I linked above. Rather interesting - especially the part about putting most of your swap file on a seperate partition on a seperate drive:

There has been a lot of argument on where to put the page file. Of course it makes sense to put it on a HD that is fast but not constantly utilized for video editing access. Here is what makes sense to me. This also follows with what MS recently published. Your system drive has a portion blocked out for the page file when you first loaded XP. Where it is located should be on the outer edges of the HD (for faster access) unless other OS were also installed on the same HD. However, placing the pagefile on the boot partition does not optimize performance because Windows has to perform disk I/O on both the system directory and the pagefile. Therefore, it is recommended that you place the pagefile on a different partition and different physical hard disk drive so that Windows can handle multiple I/O requests more quickly. However, completely removing the pagefile from the boot partition does not allow Windows to create a crash dump file (Memory.dmp) should a kernel mode STOP error occur. Not having this crash dump file could lead to extended downtime should the STOP require a debug to be performed. The optimal solution is to create one pagefile on the boot partition using the default settings and create one pagefile on another less frequently used partition. The best option is to create the second pagefile so that it is on its own partition/HD, with no data or operating system-specific files. Windows will use the pagefile on the less frequently used partition over the pagefile on the heavily used boot partition. Windows uses an internal algorithm to determine which page file to use for virtual memory management. In the above scenario, the following goals of the page file would be served


Some people install an old spare HD onto the same IDE cable as the System HD and then designate the majority of page file space to that specific drive. They use that drive for page file only. Others partition a new spare HD for space needed for pagefile - usually setting partition on outside and designated for pagefile size only.


Now the minimum size may also receive argument from many. I have my minimum set for the same as maximum. The reason I do this is that when you set the minimum the same as the maximum you are establishing a set size on the disk for the pagefile. If you set it lower than max XP will constantly be resizing the file size as usage changes. This can often lead to more page file fragmentation and after heavy hours of editing this can be very noticeable. After changing the minimum value click the Set button and when exit out you will have to reboot but go to items # 4, & 5 below to check some more changes you can make first.