Is 1GB ram enough for athlon 64 4000+ (single core)?

[wei-ste]

Hello all! I need your help to determine whether I need to add more ram ( which is a litte complicated...)
My computer since Feb 2005:

ASUS A8V-E DELUXE
athlon 64 3000+
Kingston dual channel memory PC3200 1GB total (2x256 + 2x256(added a year ago) )
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS
Sata 160GB
... ...

I have just bought a 4000+ and it will come during this week. I'm not a very demanding user, my heaviest program is photoshop CS2 which I use very often, sometimes I do light video editing, mostly to make slideshows, I don't play heavy games etc. I decided to upgrade is because I still want to keep this computer for a year or so and it's more and more difficult to buy 939 socket CPU nowadays (except 2nd hand ones and I'm afraid of overclocked ones). And the 4000+ is the best one my motherboard accepts. But what about the ram? As you can see it's complicated because there is no free space for more, and I very much like the idea of dual channel since the ram I have runs extremely well, so my question is: will the small (1gb) but quite fast(me thinks) memory be almost enough for 4000+, or will it be the thin bottle neck to hinder the CPU's extra power (and I waste money to upgrade)? Do I really need to spend money to change all ram sticks to 2x1gb (which is quite expensive)?

 

[o1die]

1 gig is enough, even for vista. Wait for your next upgrade to use more.

 

[Mondoman]

Actually, photoshop is quite demanding in terms of memory amount and CPU performance. Adding more memory (to a total of perhaps 3GB) and getting a faster CPU (say, an e6xxx) will definitely speed up your photoshop work.
However, your money would be much better spent on getting a new Core2Duo or Quad-based system with DDR2 memory. If you do go this route, be sure to get a MB with a BIOS that supports "memory remapping", as that's necessary in order to be able to use more than about 3.5GB of RAM with 64-bit Windows in the future (most such MBs should support 8-16GB max RAM).