Is 6gb's trip-chan worth it?

[THERESONATOR]

I do just fine with 2gb's of DDR 400 in my current computer, back in the day (two years ago), I had it rammed down my neck that "you won't need more than 2gb, hardly any applications use more than that". But now I'm getting an x58 chipset mobo, I know that it has triple channel memory, some of these m-boards supposedly supporting as much 24gb of DDR3 (maybe even more at some point soon). Question is, who the hell needs that much?

I'll be running Vista 64 Home Basic btw (understand that XP is not supporting more than a certain amount of memory, think it was no more than 3gb).

With me buying all this top spec stuff, I want to reduce my costs where I can. That means I'm looking at 3x 1gb of DDR3 Corsair XMS, which you can snap up for under £100. Question is, should I get 3x 2gb instead - what applications use that much? I can't think of any.

 

[Denithor]

32-bit operating systems in general have a 4GB total memory addressing cap - and your video card RAM and anything else in the system takes away from that maximum. 32-bit XP specifically is limited to 3.25GB maximum.

Since you're going to be running 64-bit Vista this won't be a limitation for you.

There are lots of programs that take advantage of >4GB, such as Photoshop, many 3d modeling/animation programs, some video editing software and even some games will hit this limit and be forced to switch to slower virtual memory (the old game Oblivion with the high texture mod comes to mind). I don't quite understand why you would spend that kind of money on a system and not put in enough RAM to keep things running smoothly.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Denithor
I don't quite understand why you would spend that kind of money on a system and not put in enough RAM to keep things running smoothly.

That's what I was wondering.

Do it, man! You already are going for 64 bit OS.

 

[DSF]

Originally posted by: Denithor
32-bit operating systems in general have a 4GB total memory addressing cap - and your video card RAM and anything else in the system takes away from that maximum. 32-bit XP specifically is limited to 3.25GB maximum.

I don't know where that number that's quoted so often comes from, but it's not true from what I've seen.

I had 32-bit XP showing 3.5GB of RAM before I changed my system over to Vista.

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: DSF
I had 32-bit XP showing 3.5GB of RAM before I changed my system over to Vista.

Weird, because I've had 2x2GB on five different systems and none showed above 3.25GB in system properties. Different sticks & different motherboards, before you ask.

EDIT: And also, worth noting, all systems had discrete video cards, with VRAM ranging from 256MB to 896MB. All sysprop screens showed the same: 3.25GB memory.

/scratches head

 

[THERESONATOR]

Yeah bearing in mind I'll mostly use it for gaming. I basically want to be able to run Crysis at 1680x1050 on everything at highest settings and highest AA and AF - and still be able to say "I can run this at more than 40fps" lol.. that would be an epic achievement for me.