Is 2GB of RAM better than 1?

[giantpinkbunnyhead]

Hey guys,

I currently have 2x512's, OCZ Plats DDR400. I have been toying with upgrading to 2x1GB, but a few people have told me that Windows XP doesn't benefit from anything above 1GB of RAM. Is there any truth to that? I'm more of a gamer than anything else... would 2GB of RAM help games operate better than 1GB? Currently playing Oblivion.

Thanks!

 

[jmdeathsquad]

2 GB will certainly make your games smoother... WindowsXP doesnt benefit from more than 3Gigs of ram, if I'm not mistaken.

 

[d3lt4]

I heard that Win XP doesn't benefit from anything over 2gb, and that 2gb is twice as good as 1gb (as long as it is 1t), but I don't have first hand experience with this. Most games don't use more than 1gb of mem but with your system why don't you max the whole thing out.

 

[Ipno]

Oblivion on 2GB is better than Oblivion on 1GB.

You'll look at the process and see, "Gee, Oblivion's really only using 400-500 megs of ram right now, so it's not using all the RAM."

Thing is, now when I change areas it's blazing fast, so its keeping a lot of stuff in ram you can't see. The framerate didn't get better from 1G to 2G but the load times are significantly better.

 

[jmdeathsquad]

yeah I upgraded from 1 GB a month or 2 ago and everything runs much smoother. I'm pretty sure you can use up to around 3 gig but that seems like overkill.

 

[dguy6789]

Going from 1GB to 2GB will not improve framerates. However, as stated above, going to 2GB of ram will improve the general smoothness of your computer operation. Games that use near your memory capacity will have improved loading times as well.

 

[zagood]

There's an issue with running 4x512 on AMD platforms, it runs at 2T instead of 1T. Not too familiar with the specifics but surprised nobody's brought it up yet.

-z

 

[jmdeathsquad]

the impact of running 2T vs 1T isn't really noticeable. Maybe 2 or 3 FPS, its up to the user whether this is a big deal or not. More ram will help, regardless of timings.

 

[CVSiN]

Originally posted by: giantpinkbunnyhead
Hey guys,

I currently have 2x512's, OCZ Plats DDR400. I have been toying with upgrading to 2x1GB, but a few people have told me that Windows XP doesn't benefit from anything above 1GB of RAM. Is there any truth to that? I'm more of a gamer than anything else... would 2GB of RAM help games operate better than 1GB? Currently playing Oblivion.

Thanks!

100% difference between 1 and 2.. and windows can see and use up to 3

if youre a gamer especially youll see a huge difference.

 

[jose]

Yes, 2 is always better than 1. (ram, cars, women)

 

[giantpinkbunnyhead]

Great replies everyone! I think I got the confirmation I was hoping for. I am going to replace my 2x512's with 2x1G's. I'll probably get some good G.Skills or Mushkins as they seem better for OC'ing.

 

[ForumMaster]

There is no such thing, as too much RAM!

 

[wetcat007]

2GB of ram is very nice to have, I'm a bit overkill with multitasking and having too much crap open so it does help a lot in windows, but defnintly noticable in Battlefield 2

 

[aniruddha23]

I tried to use Rationals new Developer on my office P4 with a gig of Ram and its a crawl. Switched to 2 GB and it works just fine. I think 2 GB will become standard in a year.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: ForumMaster
There is no such thing, as too much RAM!

:thumbsup:

I'm seriously considering getting 2GBs myself.

With Konfabulator (those little Widgets eat up loads of RAM!), Windows Blinds, my Wallpaper, AV and a couple of programs I'm usually left with barely over 600MBs...and games like WoW are starting to feel sluggish, often leaving me with less than 20MBs (!!) of physical memory left. So instead of getting rid of the eye candy and such I'll get more RAM. Plus I also do a lot of audio editing and recording and that eats globs of RAM up.

 

[JBT]

I play BF2 alot and 2GB is a a big help. 1GB would hitch all the time 2GB is very nice. I don't even worry about closing programs down when I play games now it runs just as smooth with them on as off. THere are more and more games that go over 1GB of memory popping up its only a matter of time before all the new games benifit from 2 GB.

 

[Bonesdad]

Just went from 1gb to 2gb myself. I don't play Oblivion (yet), but multitask quite a bit. Switching between progs is VERY quick and smooth now. Used to drag on forever before. Do it.

 

[thescreensavers]

well how about 52gigs on a server board with a dughter board. A total of 8 cpus and 16 cores its crazy to even think of that many cores

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: jmdeathsquad
yeah I upgraded from 1 GB a month or 2 ago and everything runs much smoother. I'm pretty sure you can use up to around 3 gig but that seems like overkill.

It never hurts. Video encoding benefits and heavy multitasking (depending on what you do) also benefits. 3GB will also help reduce you dependancy on your swap file. And if you like there is software avalable that will let you turn a portion of your system RAM into a giant DRAM Hard Drive with 500-2,000 MB/s read speeds. Set it to 1.2GB and load your game on to it. The other 1.8GB should be plenty to run your game.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: CVSiN

Originally posted by: giantpinkbunnyhead
Hey guys,

I currently have 2x512's, OCZ Plats DDR400. I have been toying with upgrading to 2x1GB, but a few people have told me that Windows XP doesn't benefit from anything above 1GB of RAM. Is there any truth to that? I'm more of a gamer than anything else... would 2GB of RAM help games operate better than 1GB? Currently playing Oblivion.

Thanks!

100% difference between 1 and 2.. and windows can see and use up to 3

if youre a gamer especially youll see a huge difference.

32 bit Windows can address up 4GB of total system. As part of Windows rules no program will use more than 3GB of RAM. Now you might be wondering about the other 1GB, if you start a differant program it will use the remaining amount of ram up to 3GB

This can be altered by editing boot.ini using the the /3GB and /nolowmem switches.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;833721
http://www.brianmadden.com/content/content.asp?ID=69

 

[Unkno]

I have two gigs right now and there are absolutely no pauses when loading new areas.....there is only a slight loading time (about 5 seconds) when you enter into a city or building

 

[Jeff7]

More RAM is always fun when you scan a high res image into the computer, and watch your photo editor's RAM usage climb to a few hundred MB, knowing that it's using RAM and not the hard drive to do its work.

 

[alimoalem]

upgrade to the 2 gigs. if you get 3 gigs, you'll either be running in single channel (3x1gig) or in 2T (2x1gig, 2x512mb) and if you use 4 gigs, you'll be in 2T plus windows doesn't allocate more than 3gb to any program. i think only 3.75GBs are recognized at max, too, so 3gb and 4gb are not the way to go.

the additional gig will help in smoothness of the computer and you'll really see the increase in performance. everyone's already said this but just thought i'd give my opinion so you're more sure about it

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: alimoalem
upgrade to the 2 gigs. if you get 3 gigs, you'll either be running in single channel (3x1gig) or in 2T (2x1gig, 2x512mb) and if you use 4 gigs, you'll be in 2T plus windows doesn't allocate more than 3gb to any program. i think only 3.75GBs are recognized at max, too, so 3gb and 4gb are not the way to go.

the additional gig will help in smoothness of the computer and you'll really see the increase in performance. everyone's already said this but just thought i'd give my opinion so you're more sure about it

True windows will not allcoate more than 3GB to a program but the remaining ram is still useable and the /3gb switch in boot.ini will overide some of that 3gb limit.

The performance differance beteen 2T and 1T with Amd Athlon 64 is noting noticeable to the user. He will more likely notice an improvement due to the increase in memory quantity in memory intensive applications. The differance between 1t and 2t is about +/- 1% . Most games are not affected much or at all by the command rate.

 

[PhoenixOrion]

Originally posted by: Noema

Originally posted by: ForumMaster
There is no such thing, as too much RAM!

:thumbsup:

I'm seriously considering getting 2GBs myself.

With Konfabulator (those little Widgets eat up loads of RAM!), Windows Blinds, my Wallpaper, AV and a couple of programs I'm usually left with barely over 600MBs...and games like WoW are starting to feel sluggish, often leaving me with less than 20MBs (!!) of physical memory left. So instead of getting rid of the eye candy and such I'll get more RAM. Plus I also do a lot of audio editing and recording and that eats globs of RAM up.

That is so true......yahoo widgets and a few download softwares running in the background sure eats it up.