2GB of memory really better than 1GB

[GearCat]

Looking at potential benefit from upgrading to 2GB of DDR PC-3200/400Mhz memory on my rig vesrsus staying put at 1GB until eventual upgrade to DDR2 motherboard.

Anyone see big performance gain with photo/video editing and gaming?

 

[cw42]

Yes. Photo/video editing can eat up ram like its nothing, and many new games can utilize upwards of 1GB of ram (Oblivion, FEAR, BF2 to name a few). I guess in your situation when you decide to upgrade will depend on when you decide to upgrade to AM2, and how badly you need it atm. But ram is cheap, so you might as well get it.

 

[Fenixgoon]

gaming depends on the game... apparently BF2 will benefit enormously (it's a ram hungry game). not sure about other games, but i'd imagine they'd speed up at least some

 

[us3rnotfound]

Most games, no 1 gb is fine. To be futre-proof is 'nother thang.

 

[SynthDude2001]

If you're doing video editing, depending on how heavy the workload is, 2GB might help. For me, 2GB helped a lot in multitasking...I could still probably get by with 1GB if I just ran my games, or my video encoding, just one heavy application at a time...but once I got a dual core and started wanting to do stuff in the background and still "use" my computer (gaming, whatever) - that's where the upgrade to 2GB helped a ton. Having a dual core doesn't help you much for heavy multitasking if you have limited RAM capacity

 

[Atheus]

I have 1G of the good stuff and game with no swap file, because if I don't, memory usage gets within 200 or 250M of the limit and windows starts paging to disk. I have encountered 1 'out of memory error' in the weeks since I have been doing this, and that was in FEAR while running Firefox in the background with about 10 tabs. 2G would benefit me somewhat now (I could re-enable the swap file and not have to worry about gaming with apps in the background) but it will benifit me much more quite soon when the next-gen games are released.

 

[TheRyuu]

2gb is getting cheap that anyone who is getting a new rig, I recommend getting 2gig's unless all you do is e-mail/web surf...

 

[GearCat]

Should have mentioned initially that I'm removing the OCZ memory I have in my system detailed below to add to identical 1GB kit I have for a newer system on which I will be using the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ (or 4400+ if 2MB of L2 cache is more important than CPU speed). Then I'll put 2GB of OCZ EL DDR PC-3200 / 400MHz / Gold memory back in this older system.

 

[Sforsyth]

I have a XP3200 and I have 1 GB of Ram now I orderd a 2 GB Kits and I'm getting it tomorrow I can let you know how it goes, I mostly game BF2 and CSS.

 

[0roo0roo]

yes

 

[zerocool84]

during battlefield 2 i noticed a nice performance boost by just going from 1gb to 1.5gb and my startups were faster

 

[Smilin]

I have a new rig w/ DDR2.

I had some problems and RMA adventures so I've been running with 1gig instead of 2 for a few weeks. I finally got my 2gig in and here is what I noticed:

Quake 4 - no change.
Oblivion - helps some.
FEAR - HUGE difference. Stuttering during caching is gone.
BF2 - helps some.
Farcry - not tested yet. didn't see any problems w/ 1gig.


Haven't loaded much else yet. If you have a game in particular you are curious about lemme know. I might have it.