>64MB memory on TX chipset MB hurt peformance

[RickH]

I have a old TX PI 233 MB (Yuck) that presently has (don't gag) 32MB of memory. The board will apparently only cashe 64 MBs. Will installing more than 64 hurt performance?? AN old article on Tom's say it will, any personal experience?? Thanks. R

 

[Pariah]

Performance decrease for uncached memory will probably be in the 15% range, and because of the way Windows works the uncached memory will always be used first. However, with current Windows OS's, running 128MB with half uncached will be much faster than 64 all cached, so I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[Rand]

Performance hit is pretty hefty- around 15-20% overall.
And as Windows accesses memory from the top down it will always be accessing the uncached memory first, and hence making the performance decrease even larger then it might otherwise be.

That said, it may be worth taking the performance hit depending on how frequently your hitting the swapfile/pagefile right now. If your virtually always uing more memory then the amount of physical memory in your system, then I'd suggest upgrading your memory as the hit from going to the pagefile/swapfile is considerably worse then uncached main memory.

If your only occasionally utilzing more then 64MB of memory then it's not going to be worth it for you, and your better off sticking with just 64MB.

 

[RickH]

Thanks for the help. The computer is only used for web surfing and an occasional Word document so the memory usage should be very low. I had the old 72 pin memory laying around with out a home, but it appears installing it would hurt the already poor performance. I ran the Soft Sandra memory benchmark and saw no difference in performance difference between 64 and 96Mbs. SiSandra did note that the chipset may not be able to cashe the additional memory. Thanks R.