computer Questions
#1
If you have 1 gb of ram or 4 gb of ram does your computer runs better games?
My speecs:E2140 Intel® Pentium® Dual CPU
2 GHz procesor
2 GHZ RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT
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#2
As a general rule more RAM is better. It also depends on your operating system.

WinXP only seems to recognize about 3.5 gigs of RAM even when more is installed.

32-bit Vista can recgnize 4 Gigs I believe, and the 64-bit version up to 16 Gigs if I recall correctly.

Overhead for XP is from 300-400megs of ram, for Vista about 700megs.

With 1 gig of RAM on Vista you'd only have 300-350megs of RAM free at any time, not accounting for page file swapping.

In any case, 1 gig is considered essentially a minimum these days for any kind of gaming (or even general computing on Vista), and 2gigs is reasonable. However, considering RAM prices nowadays, if you have a few bucks, upgrading to 4 gigs of RAM is always a good move.


-Sorry, I think I got a bit verbose here.
AMD Phenom II 965BE @ 3.4Ghz
8 GB DDR3 1333 RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6750
Windows 7 64 bit
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#3
The improvement in performance, especially in Windows Vista or Windows 7, will be much more noticeable from 1GB to 2GB, than from 2GB to 4GB. However, DDR2 RAM is so cheap, you may as well get 4GB and chuck away your current 1GB stick or 2x512MB sticks, unless you run Windows XP which doesn't manage memory nearly as well and doesn't cache as many programs into RAM.
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#4
For PCSX2 the memory size isnt really that much of a difference, after 2gb all should work the same unless you have programs that use memory a lot of course.
Core i5 3570k -- Geforce GTX 670  --  Windows 7 x64
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#5
Playing FFX, PCSX2 r1888 uses 400MB of RAM by itself (for me at least).
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#6
ph34rme: It's not that XP can't detect 4gb of ram, it's just that it can only access 4GB of memory from all systems. That is, if you have 4 GB of ram, but have a 1GB video card, XP will only see 3 GB of ram. Likewise, if you have 256mb vid card, it can see 3.75gb of ram (well a little less in both examples as there are little bits of other memory floating about your PC as well)
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#7
Actually, the amount of memory that is recognized by 32-bit XP, Vista and 7 is exactly the same. They all address the full 4GB, as stated above. However, in XP, when the user checks System Properties, it would state the amount that the OS could address, after Video Card RAM and any other RAM has been addressed (the ~3-3.5GB that most see). This caused a lot of strife with misinformed consumers, who keep asking about where their 0.5-1GB of RAM went, so in Vista and 7, they changed the displayed value to 4GB. This is purely a cosmetic change, and the actual memory addressed remains the same.

However, the memory management has been vastly improved from XP to Vista, especially with Superfetch which is an improved version of Prefetch. On systems with more memory (2GB+), Vista and 7 will perform better overall compared to XP in terms of application startup times and supposed 'snappiness'.
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#8
the thing i find funny about this thread, is not one person has mentioned that 64bit operating systems can handle as much RAM as your motherboard supports, likewise 32bit will only support 4gb of ram no matter what operating system it is, i had windows 7 32bit and it displayed 3327mb total ram while i had 4gb (4096mb) installed, if you go up to 4gb of ram, consider upgrading to a 64bit operating system if your processor supports it, it will make a difference in performance even getting 256mb more ram recognized by your operating system.

4gb of ram will make your computer multi task ALOT better then 1gb of RAM aswell, the RAM is the ammount of cache and bandwidth your processer has, say your RAM is running at 800mhz, you have 800mhz bandwidth, while if its running at 400mhz you will only get half the speed but you can still have the same ammount of cache, in this case the cache mentioned is 4gb.

There are ALOT of factors that you have to add in while looking at RAM.
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#9
Quote:say your RAM is running at 800mhz, you have 800mhz bandwidth, while if its running at 400mhz you will only get half the speed but you can still have the same ammount of cache, in this case the cache mentioned is 4gb.

Sorry to say but that doesn't make ANY sense. Do you have any idea about what you're talking about? These are 2 different things: RAM frequency and amount of RAM.
Your RAM will work at the frequency of your FSB divided by the memory divider. So if your FSB is 800 Mhz and you use a divider of 2 your RAM will work at 400 mhz and so on and so forth.
Nowhere in there does amount of RAM play any role....
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#10
RAM frequency and timings don't have a significant or noticeable impact upon performance in typical usages. Higher frequencies of RAM produce little improvement except in synthetic benchmarks. Real-world performance hardly improves, except in memory intensive applications (which don't include games and typical desktop usage; more towards professional uses, as well as applications such as SuperPi). The only viable reason why you would want higher speed RAM is to maximize your overclocking potential by keeping up with FSB increases. RAM timings are pretty much insignificant as well, in the Core 2 Duo era anyway. They have more effect on past AMD processors (I think with the on-die memory management).

What this means is, if you don't plan to overclock, buy cheaper, slower RAM, and get more of it, as opposed to buying less RAM that is faster. You'll get a better improvement in overall performance, unless you already have more than 4GB.
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