Extra 256mb memory not helping at all!

[metlfan13]

I recently purchased another 256mb of PC2100 for my Athlon system because i got it for a decent price, and figured it would help my loading times and such. I have an Athlon 1.4GHz (not overclocked) and already had 256mb ram in it. Well from my past experiences with upgraded ram, i never seemed to notice a speed increase, so this time i benchmarked before and after with SiSoft Sandra 2002. So i do all that, install the new ram, and start it up. I checked the Bios to see if it was recongnized, then when i got to windows, ran Sandra again and benchmarked. The results were exactly the same as before with just 256mb ram. The MB accepts up to 1GB, and i cant figure out why they would allow it to recieve that much if it wouldnt make a bit of difference after 256mb. I tested both sticks of ram individually to see if it was bad, but both booted and ran just fine. So the only thing i can think of now is that my processor is bottlenecking the speed. I basically just wanted to see what others thought about this situation, because if its the processor, i'll box the ram back up and try to take it back since if i were to build a new system, it wouldnt be taking the PC2100 anyway. I know 1.4GHz probably sounds like crap now with all the 3GHz+ processors out nowadays, but i'm finding it a little hard to believe that the processor is to blame here. I'm open to suggestions at this point, so any and all help would be much appreciated. I'll post everything i can think of about my system below, in case that helps in some way. Thanks.

FIC AD11 MB
AMD Athlon 1.4GHz
512MB DDR 266
Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti200
Western Digital 60GB
Windows XP Home

 

[zimu]

that is interesting. i upgraded my old system from 256 MB to 512, it definitely made a diff- i was running a celeron 400. i guess with a system that bad it makes a diff.

with my new system, a p4 2 ghz, i upgraded from 128 mb system memory to 640. obviously, it made a difference. it made MORE of a difference (positive) when i turned off virtual memory. maybe you should try that?

i noticed with my old system when i used memories at different speeds (pc 100 and pc133 chips on the same motherboard), it in fact worked SLOWER than if i used either of the chips alone, regardless of their size. so make sure you're using the same speed ram for both chips.

other than that, i dunno...

 

[PCHPlayer]

Extra memory only helps if you were running out of memory in the first place. I don't know which benchmark you ran, but if it fits into 256MB of memory you never even touched the the extra memory. You need a benchmark that uses lots of memory so that it will swap when running with 256MB and does not with 512MB. Then you will see a huge difference.

 

[helpmeout]

 

[helpmeout]

I agree with PCHPlayer. If you weren't working the computer hard enough to have a memory prob before adding the new memory, you won't see a difference. Think of the extra memory as insurance in case you get into photo editing, etc.

(This site always gets to me on login, please excuse my blank post above).

 

[Theslowone]

Check in windows task manager/perfomance and check your peak ram usage, if it is under approx 256 then it wouldn't make a difference. But if you do want to notice a difference then dl call of duty, battlefield earth or any new demo thats out; run it with 256 then run it with 512.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

I have 512MB and do video editing, I'd kill(someones pet gerbal) for the money to upgrade to 2GB. the difference is night and day if you use high bandwidth software.

 

[Theslowone]

I have 512MB and do video editing, I'd kill(someones pet gerbal) for the money to upgrade to 2GB. the difference is night and day if you use high bandwidth software.

Thats just mean :Q