Is 2 gigs enough?

[tigersty1e]

When will 4 gigs be required?

I just bought 1 gig of ram 2 months ago and it's already lagging. If I upgrade, I have to go with a 2 x2 route because I only have 2 ram slots.


1. If you have 32 bit XP Pro

2. If you have 32 bit Vista.

 

[Matthias99]

When will 4 gigs be required?

...when you run enough stuff that 2GB or 3GB isn't enough? Few if any games will be written to require more than even 1GB of memory these days, and until 64-bit is on the vast majority of systems nobody can count on having access to more than 2GB for a single program. If you do things like editing extremely large files in Photoshop, you would already have 3-4GB if you needed it.

Note that 32-bit XP/Vista will probably not see much more than 3GB in total on most motherboards. Search in the OS forum if you want gory technical details.

 

[fire400]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

When will 4 gigs be required?

...when you run enough stuff that 2GB or 3GB isn't enough? Few if any games will be written to require more than even 1GB of memory these days, and until 64-bit is on the vast majority of systems nobody can count on having access to more than 2GB for a single program. If you do things like editing extremely large files in Photoshop, you would already have 3-4GB if you needed it.

Note that 32-bit XP/Vista will probably not see much more than 3GB in total on most motherboards. Search in the OS forum if you want gory technical details.

"Few if any games will be written to require more than even 1GB of memory these days"
-umm... they already have games that require well over 1 gig.

"and until 64-bit is on the vast majority of systems nobody can count on having access to more than 2GB for a single program."
-lots of people run stuff at home that take up gigs of memory. not everyone, but a lot of people.

2 gigs is enough for me. but for the hell of it, since RAM is so cheap compared to a couple of years ago, it would be fun to just put in 4 gigs of RAM into a gaming machine and not have to worry about insufficient memory resources.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: fire400
"Few if any games will be written to require more than even 1GB of memory these days"
-umm... they already have games that require well over 1 gig.

I've seen a FEW games that CAN use more than 1GB by themselves. If you are using 500MB of memory for other background processes -- yes, you'll often go way over 1GB of usage playing a game, but it's not the game that's using all the memory.

"and until 64-bit is on the vast majority of systems nobody can count on having access to more than 2GB for a single program."
-lots of people run stuff at home that take up gigs of memory. not everyone, but a lot of people.

32-bit processes cannot access more than 2GB of memory. If a program tries to allocate more memory than that (unless it is built using something like PAE, which won't work on most desktops since it is not usually enabled by default in the desktop versions of Windows) it will fail. Ergo, 32-bit games will never try to use more than 2GB of memory by themselves.

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

its good to use more memory then you need. You can simply turn off the swap/pagefile, and load times will usually go up on games because the OS and other memory content is not accessing the drive. Plus not having one is faster, esp if you have system mechanic and force windows to keep the core files and other content on ram.

 

[tigersty1e]

Will 4 gigs ever be supported on 32 bit os systems?

Let's say there's a game that comes out that uses 3.5 gigs of memory and you have an OS that only reads 2 gigs of memory, but you have 4 gigs installed. Will the game be able to "bypass" the OS and use all 4 gigs?

 

[Zardnok]

Originally posted by: tigersty1e
Will 4 gigs ever be supported on 32 bit os systems?

Let's say there's a game that comes out that uses 3.5 gigs of memory and you have an OS that only reads 2 gigs of memory, but you have 4 gigs installed. Will the game be able to "bypass" the OS and use all 4 gigs?

No 4 gig will never be supported by 32 bit and no game will ever be able to by-pass the OS and use memory that it can not see. If you want to upgrade to 4 Gig, buy a 64 bit OS.

If you want to save money, buy a single 2 gig stick and run 3 gigs.

 

[bobbyz]

4GB can be useful for soemthing like photoshop even when using XP. Sure not all of 4GB will be used but still better than 2GB.

 

[Oyeve]

Vista 64bit SP1. Thats when 4GB will be required.

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: Zardnok
If you want to save money, buy a single 2 gig stick and run 3 gigs.

That'd screw up dual channel configurations .

 

[sisq0kidd]

Originally posted by: Aikouka

Originally posted by: Zardnok
If you want to save money, buy a single 2 gig stick and run 3 gigs.

That'd screw up dual channel configurations .

It shouldn't. One 2gb dimm and one 1gb dimm. In dual channel.

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: sisq0kidd
It shouldn't. One 2gb dimm and one 1gb dimm. In dual channel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_channel

Not according to this.

To clarify: if your motherboard has, say, two pairs of different coloured DIMM sockets (the colours indicate which bank they belong to, Bank 0 or Bank 1) then you can place a matched pair of memory modules in Bank 0, but a different capacity pair of modules in Bank 1, as long as they are of the same speed (and, ideally, manufacturer). So a pair of 1Gb memory modules in Bank 0, and a pair of matched 512Mb modules in Bank 1 would be acceptable for Dual-channel operation. This is described in some detail in the Kingston Technology paper http://www.kingston.com/newtech/MKF_520DDRwhitepaper.pdf .

Unless you're talking about 2x1GB and 2x512MB and I just took it as you meaning 1x 2GB + 1x1GB .