difference between 1.5gb and 1gb of RAM?

[DJFuji]

I'm thinking i'm going to need 1.5 gigs on a AMD64 3200+ in order to run what i'd like to run. Currently i'm on a 1.2 tbird w/ 768 PC133 so ANYTHING i get will be a huge speed increase, but i'm leaning towards 1.5gb.

This is what i run on a regular basis (albeit SLOWLY):

Norton Antivirus
Norton Firewall
AIM/Yahoo Msgr
ActiveSync
TaskManager
Azureus (almost 100 megs by itself)
FireFox 0.9 w/ over 20 tabs (showing as 135+ megs of ram under task manager)
VS.NET 2003
Dreamweaver 2004
Photoshop CS
Outlook 2003
OneNote 2003
Word 2003
Windows Explorer
IE

Now obviously when i run most of those at the same time the computer slows to a crawl. I'm regularly showing over 1gig of page file usage in task manager. That kind of leads me to believe that i'd see pretty noticable gains from 1.5gigs of ram.

I'm planning to buy crucial/Mushkin PC3200 sticks since i don't plan to overclock much. And if i do, i figure i can just adjust the ratio and have the ram run at default speeds. Or i can try to push the 3200 settings...

On the other hand, my mobo has only two slots. I dont want to buy a 1gb stick and a 512 stick and realize later that i need 2gigs -- and now i have to essentially throw away the 512 stick.

Comments?

 

[Sunner]

If you're using that much memory on a regular basis, yeah 1.5 vs 1 GB would be a good upgrade.

 

[LTC8K6]

You sound like the ideal candidate for a hyperthreading P4.

Or even a dual CPU setup.

 

[mechBgon]

Make it two 1GB modules, since A64s typically drop the memory speed to PC1600 when equipped with three 512MB modules (for stability).

 

[DarkKnight]

LOL, why do u need 20 tabs of firefox open? you can;t possibly be looking at all 20 pages at one time.

 

[mikecel79]

Originally posted by: DarkKnight
LOL, why do u need 20 tabs of firefox open? you can;t possibly be looking at all 20 pages at one time.

If your writing articles you may have many sites open as reference. I routinely have 10 IE windows open at once if I am researching something.

 

[Nocturnal]

Just shoot and go for two gigs

 

[DJFuji]

Originally posted by: mikecel79

Originally posted by: DarkKnight
LOL, why do u need 20 tabs of firefox open? you can;t possibly be looking at all 20 pages at one time.

If your writing articles you may have many sites open as reference. I routinely have 10 IE windows open at once if I am researching something.

yeah i'm often REALLY multitasking. I'll have programming stuff, web email, personal research pages, and about 10 pages of JUST AT forum (between hot deals, software, GW, and OT) open all at once, scrolling through them. I hate it because it takes a second or two now to switch to another tab while the computer swaps data from the hard drive...

I wish a 1gig stick wasnt so damned expensive. It should be lower than the price of two 512s, but its significantly HIGHER. That's why i'm hesitant to buy 2 gigs worth. You think i'll notice a performance boost with 2 gigs?

 

[CraigRT]

I'd get a dual CPU setup if I were you as well.
you can get Athlon MP's really cheap right now, as well as the registered DDR.

 

[Dug]

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
You sound like the ideal candidate for a hyperthreading P4.

Or even a dual CPU setup.

Ditto. Plus you'll have 4 slots for memory. You can fill up 3 with 512MB and add a 4th latter.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
You sound like the ideal candidate for a hyperthreading P4.

Or even a dual CPU setup.

Why? Clearly, if his pagefile usage is showing above the 1GB mark, and he only has 768MB of RAM, that will cause some thrashing. An HT CPU won't reduce the virtual-memory working-set of his application load at all.

OTOH, a dual CPU setup might improve responsiveness, IFF he upgrades the RAM first as well.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: DJFuji
I'm thinking i'm going to need 1.5 gigs on a AMD64 3200+ in order to run what i'd like to run. Currently i'm on a 1.2 tbird w/ 768 PC133 so ANYTHING i get will be a huge speed increase, but i'm leaning towards 1.5gb.

This is what i run on a regular basis (albeit SLOWLY):

Norton Antivirus
Norton Firewall
AIM/Yahoo Msgr
ActiveSync
TaskManager
Azureus (almost 100 megs by itself)
FireFox 0.9 w/ over 20 tabs (showing as 135+ megs of ram under task manager)
VS.NET 2003
Dreamweaver 2004
Photoshop CS
Outlook 2003
OneNote 2003
Word 2003
Windows Explorer
IE

Now obviously when i run most of those at the same time the computer slows to a crawl. I'm regularly showing over 1gig of page file usage in task manager. That kind of leads me to believe that i'd see pretty noticable gains from 1.5gigs of ram.

I'm planning to buy crucial/Mushkin PC3200 sticks since i don't plan to overclock much. And if i do, i figure i can just adjust the ratio and have the ram run at default speeds. Or i can try to push the 3200 settings...

On the other hand, my mobo has only two slots. I dont want to buy a 1gb stick and a 512 stick and realize later that i need 2gigs -- and now i have to essentially throw away the 512 stick.

Comments?

If you really, really, need the RAM upgrade that badly, I would go for the full 2 x 1GB upgrade, if you only have two RAM slots. I don't get you saying that your mobo only has two slots - you will need a mobo upgrade to run an AMD64 3200+ instead of a Thunderbird 1.2Ghz - so just get one with more slots then.

As far as determining your memory footprint, make sure that you enable the "VM Size" column in Task Manager, because that is the true memory "footprint" for each app, not the "Mem Usage", which is only the currently-allocated slice of RAM that the OS has apportioned at any given time.

(I too, "over-browse" using Firefox. The newest 0.9.1 released build seems to not have quite the memory-leak and slowdown issues that nearly all prior Firefox/Firebird/Mozilla versions have had, since Mozilla 1.2b. Previous versions, after browsing for a week or two straight without closing the app, would allocate as much as 1.5GB of virtual memory, all by itself. Opening/closing tabs also got notably slower under those conditions. Current builds still have the GDI-handle allocation issue though, although there is an outstanding Bugzilla report on it, so I hope that it gets fixed before the 1.0 release. I often run onto the per-process limit of 10000 GDI handles when using Firefox and leaving a lot of windows/tabs open, and I've found that the overall OS limit (in W2K), is around 16000 or so, so if your other apps use a bunch, you might see things going whacky during GDI drawing calls, missing icons, strange fonts, etc. Sadly, just like Win9x, more installed system RAM will not help this issue whatsoever.)