Hello all, it seems clear that the CM4 - 8GB works well on the uConsole.
The question I would have - is there any actual benefit for having the 8GB version?
Every comment I saw argues that 4GB is plenty - there is really no need for 8GB.
I can get either - but as the 8GB is clearly more expensive, I would like to clarify the benefits first.
Can you please share any insight? Thank you !
in my usage, i havenāt gone over 2gb of RAM used according to bpytop. Youāre limited by how much the CPU can handle multi-tasking, not the RAM. Generally, the workload that maxes out the CM4 in my unit would be, per say, Firefox with 5 tabs as well as a game like Minetest in the background. The bottleneck there isnāt the RAM but the CPU. See attached picture. But, if you have a specific memory hungry application like idk Stable Diffusion, then the extra RAM will help.
Thank you. Yes, what you say confirms what I heard so far. Anyone else would have a good reason to get the 8gb cm4?
I feel like it would fall in the line of a design software in some area like video or game/graphic design, as i was looking into getting godot on pi4, they said that a 4gb ram one would be fine for 2d game design but if you want to do 3d games youll have to go with 8gb ram
Iām using the 8GB variant of the CM4, it isnāt necessary But it is cool that I can run llama 7b 4bit on my uConsole 
Wellllllll, mostly for the giggles, I decided to see if I could get a full blown, indistry standard, back end SIEM and XDR solution running on a Piā¦ (Security Information and Event Management), ( Extended Detection and Response]
Loh and behold, I manged to get the Wazuh platform running on it, running 10 (home) end points , all comms secured through a Zerotier virtual network.
You do need the 8Gb RAM to run butā¦ so far so good.
My experience at work has been if I buy recommended specs I always end up replacing with something bigger in less than a year. That goes for RAM, Storage and CPU. So if ātheyā say all you need is 8gig with 512gb SSD and an i5 What goes on the desk will be 16gig, 1TB with i7. Made life easier for all of us. Granted it can be over kill for some things ā Just my opinion and not worth more than a cup of coffee at that.
have you tried gadot on the uconsole? i feel like the track ball mouse wouldnāt be ideal.
No only on pspi and that was with a joystick, its pretty alright actually but the screen was way to small for it to be functional
Waiting for my uconsole I have my 8gb version in the devtermā¦
Depends on your OS firstā¦ The one pre-packaged is pretty liteā¦ If someone makes an Ubuntu mate imageā¦ You will need over half of the 4gb memory just for the desktopā¦ If you do cli you donāt even need 2gbā¦
After thatā¦ as people have saidā¦ you will hit a cpu bottleneck first typicallyā¦
A sega Dreamcast had 16MB of ramā¦ps2 had 32MB
If you are gunna emulateā¦ You will be comfortable with 4gb.
My personal use thoughā¦ I dunno what you will do with yours.
Im sure there will be some overclocking capabilities with the cpu using the back cover as a heatsink if you ever need to deal with that bottleneck
I donāt have one yet myself, but I have quite a few Raspberry Pi computers. I used a Pi 4 with 4 gigs of ram as my primary machine for quite a while. Memory was an issue due to firefox. But, that was the only problem. And, even then I had a button set for xfce to just kill firefox if it got too hungry. Re-open and all the pages come right back, but inactive tabs donāt load.
I spend most of my time in a terminal, so this was not a huge issue. I ordered the model with the cm4 which has 4 gigs of ram. If I later decide that itās not enough, Iāll just swap the cm4 out. No big deal.
Using zram helps a lot. It reduces the need to swap to disk. And, thatās really a problem on a pi as micro sd cards donāt tend to have wear leveling. So, they wear out far too quickly if you hit swap often.
Iāll be running XFCE on mine when it shows up. Itās light and offers more features than LXDE.
I overclocked mine last night, yes it did show a significant performance gain the thermal and CPU bottleneck is still there well before the 4gb of RAM becomes a problem.
Please let me know on how the overclock goes also what did you clock it as
i had thw cm4 2 gig lite it was slow! just got the 4gb with wifi much better!
I detailed the process in this thread. TL;DR I overclocked it to 1800mhz on the CPU, and 750mhz on the GPU, with a 512mb GPU cache/vram allocation (note that this takes away from system RAM).
Now the long version. After doing this I saw an increase in FPS in Minetest (default game, no mods, lowest settings) from a range of 25-29 FPS to a range of 35-40 FPS. I went from no Nintendo DS games being playable through DeSmume, to some DS games running at full speed with frame skip set to 1.
The cost associated with this was heat, and power. Before my overclock the CPU wouldnāt go over 40 celsius. Now it touches 50 celsius after a few minutes under full load, and even goes up to 52. Power wise, I havenāt been able to measure but I can tell the system uses a lot more power. Tasks where the CM4 isnāt maxed out werenāt affected, heat and power wise. I scaled back the overclock to 1700mhz and 675mhz respectively as everything I played was still playable at that clock and saves a bit of power and turns down the heat a bit.
Mine would just lock up on firefox - I think due to insufficient memory ā¦ the 4GB memory CM4 has no issuesā¦ I can see how the xcompositor would use up processor time trying to make things āprettyā - disabled it and really no difference in quality - so it was really somewhat
uselessā¦
you can run more docker containers 
Considering you cannot upgrade the memory after the fact, why would you not want to for as much as possible? For example, if you want to run LLMs youāll want as much RAM as possible. Even something as simple as running a browser benefits from more RAM. Once the Pi starts swapping, you might as well reboot the machine. The fewer risk of running into swap usage, the better.
Also, I overclocked mine to CPU 2GHz and GPU 750 with overvoltage=6
My case for more RAM is Docker. Some complex lab/poc setups, not cpu hungry, but just memory.
