Just upgraded 2 gigs of ram to 4 but

[elite2005]

Hi, i been running on 2 gigs of corsair ddr2 pc6400 ram for a year, i decided to buy an extra 2 gigs of ram but theyre G.skill brand ddr2 pc6400, my question is that im running windows xp. Am i even gonna see a difference, does xp utilize over 2 gigs? Or do i need to upgrade to windows vista to hold the advantage? thanks, reason i upgraded is because i also upgraded my graphic card from a x1900xt to a 8800gt. Does 4 gigs substantially help with power hungry games like crysis? Thanks alot !

 

[Lsung000]

If you use normal XP (32-bit) it can address up to 4gig of memory. But I think XP reserves about 1gig for itself so in reality you only get about 3gigs to use if you install 4. I think that is the general case for how most computers are set up.

If you get the 64-bit version of XP or Vista you won't have this limitation.

I've never played Crysis so I'm not sure if getting more memory past 2 gigs will help much, but if I were to guess I'd say it wouldn't really make much of an impact. Upgrading your video card was a good choice to improve performance. Having lots of memory on the video card offloads

 

[elite2005]

K i just installed them and now i have all 4 but like their frequencies are different and what not, corsair being 4-4-4-12 timings while g.skill is 5-5-5-15. I'm not seeing much of a performance increase if any at all. Any good way to check lol. My xp is running in 32 bit however.

 

[starcraftfanatic]

you'l see about three gigs worth, XP/Vista 32 can address 4 gigs of memory, but that includes ALL memory (VRAM, bios ram, chipsets memory, etc.) and that memory is considered more important than your DIMMS, so it addresses them instead. perforance wise, your not going to see a perforamnce increase as the bios is probably gonna make your timings fall to 5-5-5-15 to make your RAM work.