How much memory worthwhile?

[brouillet]

Looking to put together an 815e based system with an 800+ MHz CPU and Win 98SE. I understand that I should have 128 megs of RAM. Is 256 megs overkill given that I'll be using office apps, and moderate gaming? What I wanted to do any kind of video editing? Your help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[obenton]

128 for win98 is OK. For video editing, or graphic editing of very large files, I'd perhaps add another 64-128.

 

[MWink]

128 is enough for most things. I have found that 256 does make some games run better. Video editing can also get a boost from more memory. I would not get more than 256.

 

[JellyBaby]

brouillet, I think 256 would be overkill for you right now. Maybe not in a year or so, though, as games will start to take advantage of 256 MB (I hope)! Just buy another stick of memory when you need the power (and pray memory prices are low when you need to buy).

 

[konichiwa]

I had 128 on my system and got a free 32 meg upgrade, and it was a big jump...it feels a lot snappier with 160.

 

[Ulysses]

It really depends on your operating system and apps. You need much more RAM if you're going to run Win 2000.

See http://www.kingston.com/tools/assess/default.asp for calculating your memory needs.

 

[konichiwa]

They might be a little biased though (although I haven't looked at that link) because they DO sell RAM...That'd kinda be like trusting an Intel app that calculated how many MHz your next proc. needed to be. :Q

 

[Ulysses]

Actually their recommendations are pretty reasonable, at least for the configs I looked at. And they don't differ that much from what people said here - I just thought it would make the guy feel better.

 

[dszd0g]

It really depends on what you are doing. For example, Diablo II uses almost no resources as a client. However, last weekend I hosted a 7 person game and it filled up all my 512MB of RAM plus used 600MB of swap (This is with patch 1.02).

I like having 512MB of RAM on my main machine. Diablo II loads acts on this Celeron 566 @ 875 with 512MB in about half the time it does on my next best machine a P3 500 @ 560 with 192MB which for reference loads acts in Diablo II within the same second as a K62-400 with 256MB of RAM. However, the load bar goes at different speeds on each machine at different parts. It seems that both CPU and memory play a part in how fast acts load in Diablo II.

Darkstone which is similar to Diablo II, can benefit from up to 256MB of RAM.

I don't play FPS much, but it doesn't seem to make much difference past 128 or 192MB of RAM on most of them that I have played. Video card and CPU seem to make much more difference.