2 gigs of Ram or 4 gigs?

[djnsmith7]

My personal opinion here...I love using the analogy of comparing RAM to horsepower in a sports car...You really can't have too much (I'm saying this without getting too technical)...

Anyway, I plan on having 4 GB of RAM in my system in the near future...I would suggest starting out with 2 GB & once the rest of your components are top notch, add the additional 2 GB...

 

[Rommels]

Originally posted by: Knavish
I don't have any sources for this info, but I'm pretty sure it's right. Can anyone else confirm?

In an nforce4 board 2x Dimms is good because you get the added dual-channel memory bandwidth. 4x Dimms is bad because it puts a higher electrical load on the memory bus, and the hardware usually backs off the memory timings. This slows the system down and I bet it would make OCing a lot harder.

This is why big server boards that support lots of DIMMs require Registered ram. Registered ram has a sets of registers sitting between the memory bus and the ram. This adds a minimal amount of extra time to the memory latency (you have to save the info to the register, and THEN the memory copies it from the register). The advantage here is that you don't have a really big electrical load when you add DIMMS -- you just have to charge a set of simple registers.

-Knavish

I agree with this...I have a friend who had 4GB in his and decided that it slower than 2GB so he just took two out. BTW it was OCZ Platinum.

Originally posted by: SnoMunke

Originally posted by: SophalotJack
I guess you could run without a page file on your HD if you ran a 4gb system. That would actually be pretty sweet.

Windows XP/Server requires a page file.

Yes it requires one but I think he was refering to running it in RAM.
As THIS SS I took of my page file setup show there is an option for no page file.

True Windows will still use one and always will no matter what.
I haven't noticed a difference anyways between running on the no page file option and running one.

Originally posted by: rod

Originally posted by: Rommels

Originally posted by: Tick

Originally posted by: SophalotJack
I guess you could run without a page file on your HD if you ran a 4gb system. That would actually be pretty sweet.

You don't need much of a page file under 2 gb either.

I do with just 2GB and don't notice any thing wrong.
Right now my PF usage is 387MB

Windows seems to write some stuff to a page file, even when your RAM is nowhere near full.

RoD

True dat true dat, Windows doesn't care what you say it will have a page file and there isn't any thing you can do about it.

 

[SnoMunke]

you CAN run Windows without a page file...BUT there are many programs and parts of Windows itself that look for the page file... run at your own risk I guess.