8 gig (ram) VS 4 gig on Revit 64

[Matt Brennan]

Hi Everyone,

Is anyone using 8 gigs vs 4 gigs on a 64 bit platform with Revit 64? Do you see a huge difference between small and large project? Do you find it speed up your OS?

Thanks for you input

[kpaxton]

Is anyone using 8 gigs vs 4 gigs on a 64 bit platform with Revit 64? Do you see a huge difference between small and large project? Do you find it speed up your OS?

Go with 16, if you can!! :D

In all seriousness, the adage of 'more is better' comes into play here also - don't skimp if you can. If you can't afford more ram now, plan for adding up to 8 or 16 in the future. I have 8 in my base machine, while I have 4 in my x64 laptop - there is a bit of difference.

And to answer your question, yes. In larger projects you will have more capability in the 64-bit environment with 8 than you will with 4gb of ram. Specifically, when you try to upgrade a 2008 project to 2009 with x64, Revit will use all the Ram you can give it. We've seen a 250 MB Central file take a couple of hours to upgrade and the paging file go over 8 gb!!

As to speeding up your OS? There is not a perceptible increase that I've seen with the Revit Platform, other than to handle the more Ram and be more stable. The capability of having multiple Apps open with Revit in the x64 OS with Revit is nice.

Oh, and if you can, get a Quad core! :beer:

Kyle

[DaveP]

I've heard a few people say that there really isn't a huge advantage running 64bit with "only" 4 Gig. To take advantage of everything 64bit has to offer (mainly bigger models), you need 8 Gig.

[sbrown]

I just upgraded from 4 to 8 on a Vista 64 running revit 200964 and it "seems" much better. I've been running tests on large projects and the machine is consistently using 7.5+ gigs of the ram, so it must be useful. It seems like the more you have the more your programs will "take". The os on start up takes 1.7gigs. When revit opens and loads a project med. size its up to 3.5gig without even doing any work yet.

[Matt Brennan]

Thanks Guys for the positive responses!!! It just make sense for the price it is to upgrade.

You mention Vista 64, I am using it at home which I personally find it faster than XP Pro 64. Is anyone else using Vista in the work place?

Thanks again for the comments,

[Paul Monsef]

Thanks Guys for the positive responses!!! It just make sense for the price it is to upgrade.

You mention Vista 64, I am using it at home which I personally find it faster than XP Pro 64. Is anyone else using Vista in the work place?

Thanks again for the comments,
I am using Vista 64 and as soon as i can spare the time I am going back to XP pro 64.

Not necessarily due to issues with Revt & Vista (although i have seen viewport issues in Revit as well), but running 3ds MAX on Vista is killing me. http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/17968/#88027

[iankids]

I have recently changed from 32bit xp pro to 64bit Vista, primarily to take advantage of the ability to pop in some extra ram. Currently I have 8 gig Ram and I find Revit to be sooooo much nicer than it was for me under xp pro with 4 gig (3 gig switch enabled).

It is much, much smoother, hardly ever crashes (previously, 2009 would bomb out on a daily basis), and seem to be notciably faster - particularly when rotating a 3d view in shaded mode.

All up, from my expirience I would say go for it, I am more than happy with the results at this end.
Rendering is much better now with the extra ram & quad core cpu.

Cheers,

Ian

[mark.98140]

on larger renderings you will find that the software can handle the larger files with ease... ued to have problems in this regard, now can render two at the same time... not that it is ideal, as it slows down the machine a little in the long run, but alieviates the need for batch rendering sometimes. cheers.