Bought some new RAM...

[Worf101]

When I built my rig in 2004, I went with a gig of RAM. No overclocking no CL adjustments, just put it in and went my merry way. Well, I'm doing a round of minor upgrades this year. Previously I'd build a new rig every 2 years. This time around with Vista on the horizon, DirextX 10 and both AMD and Intel about to release new processors, I decided to wait till late 2007 before a new build. So in order to stay competitive I bumped my vid card slightly to an X850 XT, got tow "real" 74 Gig Raptors, a Western Digital "My Book" for off rig backup and lastly I bumpe my RAM up to two full gigs.

The question is, what kind of performance increase will I see with a 2 Gig's of Ram vs. 1 Gig?

Da Worfster

 

[waylander]

That depends, did you just buy another 2 x 512 or did you replace your 2 x 512 with a 2 x 1gb?

The 2 x 1gb will give you a better performance boost than adding another 2 512mb modules. The difference is the 1T vs 2T command timings when using 2 slots vs 4 slots.

Also please list all your specs.

 

[Newf]

Check the Total and Peak Commit Charge in the task manager. If they are less than 1 gig, then you will not see much improvement. If greater than 1 gig, then you will eliminate page swapping to disk with 2 gig and will see a benefit.

 

[invictus25]

hi, i just got myself another gig of ram..so now in total i have 2x1gig of kingston pc3200 ram.,...i used it as dual channel but i dont feel much of an improvement in my system's performance...as u said about the commi charge...mine read as
total: 305408
limit:3516228
peak: 944868

wat do u think?

 

[rodney_ws]

I have a 1 GB laptop and a 2 GB desktop and in general Windows use, they feel about the same... fire up a game an it's a whole different story... on my desktop when I had 1 GB, Battlefield 2 would stutter a bit... the 2nd GB resolved that problem.

Not sure what sort of change you were expecting.

 

[Worf101]

That depends, did you just buy another 2 x 512 or did you replace your 2 x 512 with a 2 x 1gb?

The 2 x 1gb will give you a better performance boost than adding another 2 512mb modules. The difference is the 1T vs 2T command timings when using 2 slots vs 4 slots.

Also please list all your specs.

I went with 2X IGig sticks. I know that with my Mobo I couldn't get for sticks of 512 to work. I did a LOT of research on what RAM to get, and it's being delivered as we speak, just curious about the effects.

Current Rig:

AMD Athlon 64Fx-53
ATI X850 XT
Asus A8V Deluxe VIA K8T800 Pro Chipset ATX AMD MB
1 Gig of OCZ 3500 unbuffered Ram
2 Western Digital 74 Gig Raptors in Raid 0
DVD ASUS 16X DVD
DVD+/-RW PLEXTOR|PX-712A
CPU FAN Thermaltake Silentboost K8
Cooler Master Wave Master Case
Antec NeoPower 480 Watt PSU
SB Audigy 2Z Platinum Sound Card
Dell Ultrasharp 2005FPW 20.1 Wide Flat Panel

I went with Patriot cause it was cheap and NewEgg's getting it to me from Jersey in less than 24 hours!!! Most user's of this RAM said it's pretty safe, just plug and play and I won't have to fiddle with any timings. I heard though that there are performance ienhancements if you put the ram in slots 2 + 4 and adjust the timings but I've never done that. I simply went slots 1 + 3 and prayed like heck that the thing would boot.

Da Worfster

 

[Da_Banig]

At this point, 2Gig is not much difference if you aren't doing video editing, photoshop... stuff like that. I got had 1Gig of Corsiar XMS RAM and now I have 2Gigs, no differnece at all. But when Vista release you will see a huge improvement from one to 2Gig

 

[Newf]

Your Peak commit charge is awfully close to 1024000 (1 gig). Adding the 2nd gig will keep your system humming, especially when you play memory-hog games like BF2 or do a lot of multitasking. That said, as of the screen check you made you are not yet using the 2nd gig to keep page swapping in check. As dual channel memory you are using that stick though, and this will speed up your system if set up right. There is always the issue of how fast a system "feels" compared to how it specs out. Except for multitasking work, my X2 3800+ system "feels" no faster than my P4 2.4 Northwood. Spec sheets say something entirely different though. Both my systems use 2 gigs of RAM. It's cheap and Vista is coming soon!

 

[invictus25]

Not sure what sort of change you were expecting.

now that u said it, i started to think...wat change am i expecting...lol...true enough that u wont feel any diff if u are just operating normal office work...have yet to try some games on my new 2 gig ram...just got it 2 days ago and currently still having my exams so i aint got any time to run any games on my system yet...

 

[mesarectifier]

People are upgrading to 2gb in anticipation of Vista - XP is terrible at handling memory, and while we hope Vista will be better than XP at handling the memory, it'll still be using a load more memory anyway.

Just be glad they aren't still inflicting that active file system on us (ahhhh, Longhorn 4051)

 

[invictus25]

well, now that u said it, i feel kinda glad that i bought my other gig of ram...i inserted my ram in the 1st and 3rd slots (of the same colour)...dual channel rocks

 

[Worf101]

Wow what a great hardware experience. I ordered two gigs of RAM from NewEgg weds. morning, had it installed by thursday afternoon. Wow. Patriot RAM went right in booted right up. Don't notice any improvement on games but when doing system installs and reloading 100's of MP3's on my Raptors I found that reading from disc to HD went faster than snot. Significantly quicker when transferring files, doing installs and other crunchy stuff. Going up to 2 gigs was/is a smart and relatively painless thing to do.

Da Worfster