differences between 2GB and 3GB ram

[mentalcrisis00]

Hey all

I have a Dell 1500 Laptop that I bought last september, I also bought 2x1GB Gskill DDR2 Ram for $70 with it because dells price was to expensive. The Ram has been working great but I'm looking to get a bit more speed out of my system, I'm a professional photographer and I work with alot of 1200 to 6400 dpi images in photoshop CS3 which can get over 2GB in size, needless to say the system slows down. Also I do play some games like Doom 3, HL2, and Crysis and they all drop frames at high settings.

Now to my ultimate question, seeming DD2 ram prices are so low now I can get a 2GB stick for $25-$40, I'm wondering if there would be any noticeable speed difference if I went from 2GB to 3GB of ram?

-Ray

Dell Vostro 1500
2GHZ intel core 2 duo
2GB DDR2 ram
160GB sata drive
Nvidia 8600mGT 512MB
Windows XP media center

 

[MegaVovaN]

How many RAM slots does your laptop have? Typically laptops only have 2 slots for RAM so you're better off buying 2x2gb sticks and dumping 1gb sticks. This will give you a little over 3 gb ram.

Definitely will help with Photoshop - not sure about games...in games like Crysis extra ram won't help because your gfx card isn't the fastest.


edit: if you want to have one 2gb stick and one 1gb stick thats fine but you lose dual channel.

 

[JackMDS]

Q - "differences between 2GB and 3GB ram "

For a Lap top?

Cost more produces No functional difference.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: MegaVovaN
edit: if you want to have one 2gb stick and one 1gb stick thats fine but you lose dual channel.

No you won't. His laptop has the 965 chipset, which features Intel's Flex memory technology. He'll still have 2x1 GB in dual-channel, with the 3rd GB in single channel.

 

[Jiggz]

Well, for less than $40 you can get an additional GB of ram which in one way or another should mitigate the slow downs in your system when using Photoshop. One thing for sure, you'll never see improvement if you do not upgrade to 3GB! The worst thing that could happen is that there will be an additional GB of ram available for your use. Remember, in a 32bit OS, 2GB is the maximum amount of memory address allocated by Windows (XP or Vista) for application use and also 2GB for kernel use for a total of 4GB of memory addresses. Regardless of your physical ram size, windows will use hdd or virtual memory to fulfill this 4GB. So the more physical ram you have, the less likely Windows will use the hdd for virtual memory usage, thus speeding up your system. Another option you can use is the /3Gb switch but even this has limitations. And lastly, you might want to invest in a RAMDISK PLUS for a scratch disk for Photoshop. If you decide to go this route, highly recommend upgrading your system ram to 4GB (2X2GB sticks) and creating a 1GB or at least 750MB ramdisk.