How much RAM do I need?

[Croda]

Building a new Athlon XP 1600+ system. I'll be running Win2K Pro for the forseeable future. I was thinking about getting 512 MB PC2100 from Crucial @ ~$80. Do I need 512 or will 256 do the job? I was thinking about getting 256 and getting another 256 later if prices come down some more.

Anyone?

Thanks.

 

[Viper GTS]

With prices where they are now, go ahead & grab 512. They aren't going to go much lower, & have even been going up in the last couple weeks.

Viper GTS <-- Will never use less than 512 MB again, soon to go to 1 GB or more

 

[boyRacer]

512...and i think prices were going higer?

 

[HalfCrazy]

Like the other people said go ahead and get the 512mb of ram. It will help if you are into editing, multi-tasking, ect.

 

[ku]

256 will be enough. It's really up to you as wel. If you have the money, just go ahead and get 512. If you dont have money and you feel like waiting to see if RAM prices drop, 256 will do. I'd personally get 512.

 

[erikiksaz]

I'd say that 512 is the sweet spot for most users, excluding the power users. I have 512 and it's fine for gaming, which is what i usually do.

 

[blstriker]

In my rig I have 1 gig o ram, but from experience, there isn't much speed difference between 256 and 512. I usually have 10-12 windows open at a time and I multitask heavily. W2k pro sucks below 192 megs of ram and then the performace after that levels off really fast. For w2k, below 192 sucks - above 192 --> 1 gig, performace starts to plateau.

 

[ace31216]

256MB is all you will really need... Might as well spend the extra 30 bucks on some other component

 

[sharkeeper]

BAH!!!

You can NEVER have enough memory!.

Just like anything else out there: whenever it becomes available it is loaded to 104% capacity!

Cheers!

 

[Rahminator]

For me 384 MB is enough, but I have AK31A with 4 dimm slots so hey, I can put another 512 MB here .

 

[erub]

holy crap, 2 gigs worth of ram almost all used up? Personally I have 320 megs, but i have 92 megs free - running 4 copies of IE, winamp, AIM, and a bunch of taskbar apps in Windows XP. I don't think 256 would be enough, but since the price diff. between 128 and 256 is not very much, might as well get the 512 rather than 384.

 

[Chipset]

Some people say the increasing prices of RAM are because of the holiday season. So they should drop in January if this is the case. If you are planning on running XP sometime in this PC's future the extra 256 would be worth it. XP is a hog.