Is 1GB ram enough for athlon 64 4000+ (single core)?

[weiste2]

Hello all! I need your help to determine whether I need to add more ram ( which is a litte complicated...)
My computer since Feb 2005:

ASUS A8V-E DELUXE
athlon 64 3000+ (upgrading to 4000+)
Kingston memory dual channel PC3200 1GB total (2x256 + 2x256(added a year ago) )
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS
Sata 160GB
... ...

I have just bought a 4000+ and it will come during this week. I'm not a very demanding user, my heaviest program is photoshop CS2 which I use very often, sometimes I do light video editing, mostly to make slideshows, I don't play heavy games etc. I decided to upgrade is because I still want to keep this computer for a year or so and it's more and more difficult to buy 939 socket CPU nowadays (except 2nd hand ones and I'm afraid of overclocked ones). And the 4000+ is the best one my motherboard accepts. But what about the ram? As you can see it's complicated because there is no free space for more, and I very much like the idea of dual channel since the ram I have runs extremely well, so my question is: will the small (1gb) but quite fast(me thinks) memory be almost enough for 4000+, or will it be the thin bottle neck to hinder the CPU's extra power (and I waste money to upgrade)? Do I really need to spend money to change all ram sticks to 2x1gb (which is quite expensive)?

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: weiste2
Do I really need to spend money to change all ram sticks to 2x1gb (which is quite expensive)?

Yes, Photoshop is the most RAM-hungry of any application that I'm aware of. As a matter of fact, with an non-overclocked A64 3000, and only 1 GB of RAM, your RAM is much more of a bottleneck than your cpu. Oh, and welcome to Anandtech.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Originally posted by: myocardia

Originally posted by: weiste2
Do I really need to spend money to change all ram sticks to 2x1gb (which is quite expensive)?

Yes, Photoshop is the most RAM-hungry of any application that I'm aware of. As a matter of fact, with an non-overclocked A64 3000, and only 1 GB of RAM, your RAM is much more of a bottleneck than your cpu. Oh, and welcome to Anandtech.

He speaks the truth, Photoshop loves memory. Also, you may want to look into tweaking the Photoshop scratch file. If you can, put it on a physically seperate HD from the OS. You may want to also put your Windows paging file on a seperate HD from the OS as this will further reduce I/O on your system drive. Regardless of how much memory you have, you cannot actually stop Windows from using a page file so this can be a bottleneck also.