Should I get more memory?

[i30i3i3y]

Hi,

Just want some advice. Here's my setup

P4 2.4 GHz (533FSB)
MS6585 (SiS 648F Neo) Motherboard
512Mb PC2700 RAM
Radeon 9800pro 128Mb

When playing HL2 and counterstrike source on the recommended settings i get low FPS's, sometimes below 20. A friend of mine had the same card, AthlonXP 2400+ and 1Gb PC3200 Dual Channel memory and said his framerate rarely dropped below 50. The only difference I can see is the memory. My commit charge in task manager does exceed 512, once it went into the 600's.

Is it worth upgrading to 1Gb of PC2700 memory (not dual channel, mobo doesn't support it ). Would it improve my framerate at all or is the bottleneck elsewhere?

 

[BrentUnitedMem]

Your friend has quite a different memory setup than yours. Your friend has 1GB dual channel PC-3200, which means he most likely has two sticks of 512MB. In dual channel this is a total bandwidth of 6400MB/s, compared to your setup which only has a maximum of 2700MB/s.

I can tell you this is a significant difference.

I don't think upgrading to 1GB will really help you in this case.

Can anyone else comment?

 

[jammydodger]

I reckon you will def see a performance increase with another 512MB of RAM, but it will not but your performance on par with your m8s 2400+.
The SiS648 was a pretty pants chipset (trust me I have it), make sure you have updated its AGP drivers...it gave me a massive increase in performance when I did this.

BTW, dual channel in AthlonXP systems does NOT provide 6.4GB/sec of bandwidth. It is differnt to P4's and Athlon64s dual channel. The XP staggers the latencies of the memory chips, which only gives a 4-5% performance increase over non-dual channel.

 

[Crashman]

There's nothing wrong with the 648 when compared to the 845! Lots of cheap boardmakers doing SiS a disfavor by putting the chipsets on poorly designed boards though.

And you're right, it probably is his chipset driver.

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[rower30]

I upped my 845 chipset board to 1Gig from 512Meg and my 3D score benchmark went from 5700 to 5900. Not a big change, really, but it did go up some. Is that worth 75-100 bucks compared to puting it towards better video card or (free) the right AGP drivers? Nope.

The trick to procrastination is to just not do it very long.