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Patriot 4GB 2x2gb kit **COLDER 150$ AR**

they are sitting in my shopping cart now.
tempting indeed! oh boy....

but i heard windows xp doesnt take advantage of ram greater than 2gb, right?
how about windows vista ultimate? i might upgrade just to see how fast 4gb is!
 
Originally posted by: tuyu
they are sitting in my shopping cart now.
tempting indeed! oh boy....

but i heard windows xp doesnt take advantage of ram greater than 2gb, right?
how about windows vista ultimate? i might upgrade just to see how fast 4gb is!
Click to expand...

Yes, the x64 version will take advantage of 4 GB.
 
vista 64 definitely takes advantage of more then 4gb, xp 64 does as well but vista makes better use of memory in general.
 
In for one, thanks, OP.

I'd use it with basically any speed 'commodity' CPU for most purposes.
If you're paying a ton of extra money for an even faster CPU that's like
10-20% faster than the commodity type mainstream E6300/E6600s then, yeah,
you might as well spend $100 more on extra fast RAM for it if you need that
extra 20% of performance for $100 more or whatever.

But let's face it, most of the time RAM goes into disk cache and preventing your
programs from paging/swapping to disk when you have a lot of programs loaded or
are processing a lot of files / data.

It is those cases -- the lack of RAM for programs or disk cache -- that typically
is what slows down a computer 95% of the time. In such cases it just doesn't
matter HOW fast the RAM is, because even the *slowest* RAM is *always way faster*
than your disk drive which is the alternative of where the CPU would have to
wait to read / write the data to. So in such situations *any* extra RAM however slow
helps a lot.

Of course if you're doing something like virus scanning or backup copying involving
your whole disk, it doesn't matter how fast your RAM or CPU is because it's the
speed of the disk that's slowing it down accessing most all of your data once
rather than accessing a few gigabytes of data repetitively like you would when playing
games or working on most other applications.

So get the extra amount of cheap RAM, and enjoy your faster computer unless
you're doing some very specialized multimedia / scientific type computing where you're
number crunching your whole RAM full of data over and over and over again for
hours and hours and hours in which case, well, maybe faster CPU/RAM might help
ya get 20% faster or whatever...


PS -- Windows XP 32 bit will work fine with just a *bit* less than 4GB memory.
If your motherboard / BIOS supports your installed 4GB RAM, XP will work,
it'll just not use a little bit of the last 1 GB.
e.g. you subtract the size of the memory on your video card and maybe a few dozen
more MBy from 4GB and that's the max. that XP 32 will use in most cases. I've
been using 3GB with XP32 fine for a couple years... So if you put 4GB in you'll
end up with maybe 300-400MB RAM that XP32 can't use, but at these prices it's
still worth it just to get the extra 1GB and be able to use all 4GB eventually if you
run VISTA 64 or LINUX 64 or some other 64 bit OS to get the full advantage
of what XP won't use.
 
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