Upgrading RAM for games

[yasser_azeem]

Hello,

I bought my PC about 2.5 years ago, Specs were

Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz
RAM: 2GB DDR2
Motherboard : Intel DG31PR
HDD : Maxtor 320 GB

I am casual gamer and play games sometimes. Therefore, i changed PSW to 400W and installed MSI GT 440 1GB graphics card last week. My current graphics card is not a high level card but still I played FarCry2 and its working great on Ultra settings.

My motherboard can support RAM up to 4GB Maximum and it supports only DDR2 RAM.

Should i install more 2 GB DDR2 RAM in my system for playing games or not ? Does games depend on Graphics card memory or on RAM ?

 

[cumi2k4]

Yes...get that additional 2gb.
Games depends on both, actually.

 

[raptor2022]

I would suggest to upgrade to 4GB RAM. 4GB is a pretty decent amount of RAM. It is especially important if you are running Windows7.

Games depend on both GFX Memory and RAM. Things like textures etc use GFX RAM, but loading scenery and things like that sometimes require more RAM and CPU power. Depends on the situation in the game.

It is a tough thing to say how much RAM a game actually needs. Most games will be fine with 3GB of RAM. RAM is where your PC stores certain information so that you PC can access it quickly. If this space runs out, it starts to use your hard drive space (a page file is created). Your hard drive read/write speeds are much slower than what your RAM can do. So it's important to have enough RAM space so as not to run out. 4GB is the generally accepted level of "enough" RAM at the moment. More than that is usually overkill

 

[alrobichaud]

I realize you probably won't be playing battlefield 3 on you computer but my RAM usage peeks at 5.4GB while running win7, bf3 and a couple of minor hardware monitoring programs. Also, I hit 4.1GB of RAM usage while playing crysis 2. Just some food for thought.

 

[Raiddinn]

RAM is cheap, another 2GB of DDR2 is probably about $25.

Unless that amount of money is overly important to you, I would spend it and go up to 2 x 2GBs.

Make sure it is the same manufacturer part number as well, if you can. A lot of old RAM is still being sold.

I generally advise people to go with 2 x 2GB for Windows XP and 2 x 4GB for Windows 7 if possible. Only when the motherboard can't handle it or the person is extremely budget sensitive would I suggest anything else.

 

[ahnilated]

What OS are you on btw and is it 64 bit?

 

[yasser_azeem]

Thanks all,

I have Windows 7 32-Bit

 

[cumi2k4]

32-bit OS will do with 4gb of ram.

 

[yasser_azeem]

Best answer selected by yasser_azeem.

 

[yasser_azeem]

Thanks all