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Alright, how much overkill would 1.5 gigs of ram be?

I

imported_Ziggy

Senior member
I have a dell 2.66 P4 with 533mhz fsb and 2 x 256 ram. I'd like to get more ram, and for about $50 each, I can get 2 sticks of 512mb pc 2700. I'd like to keep it running in Dual Channel, even if its just a dell and probably won't see much performance difference.

will my pc run faster with more ram? Usually it idles at about 140 and is less than 256 with the programs I use. I play Battlefield 1942 which eats up ram though.
 
im not the smartest but wouldnt dual channel pc2700 put you to 666mhz fsb? and it would only run at 533fsb with that and pc2100 DDR266 x 2 = 532.. im kinda new so if theres something that im overlooking point me to it, thats why im asking..lol

 
It's always damn hard to have *too much* RAM

What you don't use for running processes the system will use for cache 🙂
 
FFactory0x,

More RAM slow down the machine? No not at all.

I was in much the same situation as DrEvilEvil was, and I ended up with 1.5 Gb of Kingston HyperX RAM. With that much RAM, I had no need for hard drive based "virtual memory."

Normally, Windows uses a "paging file" on the hard drive to increase the amount of RAM you physically have. Hard drive access is MUCH slower than electronic RAM, so I run with NO PAGING FILE, virtual memory = 0.

If you don't turn that off, it's possible that the system would "feel slower" when it pages RAM out to disk... regardless of how much RAM you have in your system. Thoughts from anybody else out here with large RAM systems?

Metron
 
Originally posted by: FFactory0x
Doesnt over a gig or so slow down the machine??? I heard this somewhere
Click to expand...

Firingsquad had an article covering this topic. In that article they showed that if you have 1.5gig of ram or more and do not use effectively, then you will have a lower performance. Partially, this is also due to higher timings which are often needed to be employed since now you have 4 modules to worry about and not just 2. I would presume that when your system will need more than 1 gig of ram, your computer as a whole will become too slow for those applications. I'd say get an extra 512 and that's enough.
 
Originally posted by: FFactory0x
Doesnt over a gig or so slow down the machine??? I heard this somewhere
Click to expand...

Firingsquad had an article covering this topic. In that article they showed that if you have 1.5gig of ram or more and do not use effectively, then you will have a lower performance. Partially, this is also due to higher timings which are often needed to be employed since now you have 4 modules to worry about and not just 2. I would presume that when your system will need more than 1 gig of ram, your computer as a whole will become too slow for those applications. I'd say get an extra 512 and that's enough.
 
Well, 2 x 512 at $110 from Kingston isn't that much more than 2 x 256. I could just get a single stick, but that would mean no more dual channel.
 
Originally posted by: DrEvilEvil
I have a dell 2.66 P4 with 533mhz fsb and 2 x 256 ram. I'd like to get more ram, and for about $50 each, I can get 2 sticks of 512mb pc 2700. I'd like to keep it running in Dual Channel, even if its just a dell and probably won't see much performance difference.

will my pc run faster with more ram? Usually it idles at about 140 and is less than 256 with the programs I use. I play Battlefield 1942 which eats up ram though.
Click to expand...

Chipset in use? And if your just a general "power user" , 1gig shoud easily be enough.
Like someone says, there is a latency penality for having all 4 dimms filled, something you may not care about.
 
i865 I believe.


Ok, now the question is, how much faster does dual channel make the computer? Keep in mind that this is just a dell (with a 9800pro, all for $500 🙂 )

I want to add more ram, so which is the better option.

A. add 2 x 512, fill up 4 dimms, run in dual channel, 1.5 gig
B. add 1 x 512, fill up 3 dimms, not dual channel1 gig
C. add 2 x 256, fill up 4 dimms, run in dual channel, costs almost as much as A, 1 gig

How much really is the performance hit going over 1 gig and using 4 dimms? Is it different from using 3 dimms?
 
I've got 512 and often find MaxBoost disabling itself due to lack of memory while gaming.

though what you could possible need 1.5GB for BurnItDwn?
 
i have a 1 gig and its enough. the only thing more woudl help with would be photoshop and graphics rendering programs. for most things 512 or 1 gig is plenty
 
Originally posted by: Metron
FFactory0x,

More RAM slow down the machine? No not at all.

I was in much the same situation as DrEvilEvil was, and I ended up with 1.5 Gb of Kingston HyperX RAM. With that much RAM, I had no need for hard drive based "virtual memory."

Normally, Windows uses a "paging file" on the hard drive to increase the amount of RAM you physically have. Hard drive access is MUCH slower than electronic RAM, so I run with NO PAGING FILE, virtual memory = 0.

If you don't turn that off, it's possible that the system would "feel slower" when it pages RAM out to disk... regardless of how much RAM you have in your system. Thoughts from anybody else out here with large RAM systems?

Metron
Click to expand...

Swapping will only bog down the system when there's lots of swapping going on (i.e. you have a small amount of ram and you're trying to access something large that got paged out), if you have 1.5GB of ram I highly doubt you're going to ever notice any swapping going on.
 
I have 1.5GB and I could probably use a bit more. My system hosts our Office2000Pro Administrative Installation Point at work. The Office2000Pro AIP comprises about 20000 files totalling 940MB. The first computer to pull an Office2000Pro installation, my system has to pull that data off the hard drives. Windows2000 says

😛 ~ whoa, I got 1.5GB of RAM layin' around... I'll just leave them files in RAM in case something else wants 'em later

and that is what it does. All the following Office2000Pro installs come straight out of my RAM with no HDD activity at all (until I reboot the system or until it needs a very big chunk of RAM for something else, that is).

So what that means to you is this: the longer you go between reboots, the more of your stuff can potentially get cached in all that seemingly-excessive RAM so it can re-launch really fast later. Case in point: for me, PhotoImpact 6 launches in about 4 seconds from a 15000rpm SCSI drive, but about 1 second from RAM.
 
well, for one I like to multitask
I also like to burn dvd-rs of data ... and when i burn stuff, I like to rar things first ... (ever though files may already be compressed, its mostly just for my method of organization) ... my dvdrs usually have about 75 to 100 rars on them ... each instance of winrar uses about 33MB of ram, I'd like to be able to have more than 30 copies of winrar open simultaneously while, cruising the web, listening to music, burning a cd or dvd, watching a movie, downloading from usenet, uploading files to ftps and/or posting to usenet. It's not very often that i my machine slows down to a halt to play with the page file .. however, when it does it is annoying.
 
According to my favourite computer magazine Maximum PC they recommend that you upgrade from whatever you have now to 1GB of DDR-SDRAM as upcoming games like Half-life2 and Doom3 can and will use the extra RAM. Anything over 1GB is overkill and a waste of money, IMHO.:beer:
 
Originally posted by: WobbleWobble
Originally posted by: TheBoyBlunder


1gb here on an amd system...haven't felt a difference between 512mb and now.
Click to expand...

Same here.
Click to expand...

I actually just added another 512MB (for a total of 1GB) and got a slightly lower score in 3DMark2001. With only 512MB I got a 19675 and after adding the other 512MB I got a 19604 or something. I was hoping to break 20000 with the extra RAM but I guess not. Maybe I'm doing something wrong... Nothing else has changed besides adding the RAM.

So in my case, although I don't notice any real difference anywhere else, I had a slight performance drop in a gaming benchmark, after adding more RAM. whatever that means...



 
Originally posted by: redivider
Originally posted by: WobbleWobble
Originally posted by: TheBoyBlunder


1gb here on an amd system...haven't felt a difference between 512mb and now.
Click to expand...

Same here.
Click to expand...

I actually just added another 512MB (for a total of 1GB) and got a slightly lower score in 3DMark2001. With only 512MB I got a 19675 and after adding the other 512MB I got a 19604 or something. I was hoping to break 20000 with the extra RAM but I guess not. Maybe I'm doing something wrong... Nothing else has changed besides adding the RAM.

So in my case, although I don't notice any real difference anywhere else, I had a slight performance drop in a gaming benchmark, after adding more RAM. whatever that means...
Click to expand...


If you have all of your memory settings on auto, it probably relaxed the timings a bit when you put in the extra module.
 
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