question about ram

[slightlyhuman]

setup:

DFI lanparty bf3 250gb
2x512 3200 corsair value


i need more ram like it's nothing. i don't have the money to buy 2 1GB sticks so i can still run dual channel. i was just thinking of picking up a 1gb stick and throwing it in the middle slot(the mobo has 3 memory slots).

since i won't be running dual channel with 3 slots taken up, will i notice a performance loss or will the extra gig take care of that?

tia

 

[Tweak155]

Chances are you will have better performance with the 3 sticks than with the original 2, but of course 4x dual channel would most likely beat the previous.

Speed means nothing if you don't have enough of the memory

 

[Lord Evermore]

I started to write out a longer answer, but then I realized, you're using an NF3 250GB board (no such thing as a Lanparty BF3 250gb, it's NF3 250gb). You don't even have a system that supports dual-channel memory (Athlon64 Socket754 is single-channel).

[Beginning of original answer.]
It'll depend on what you're doing. If you run a single program which uses up so much memory that it causes the OS to swap memory from other programs to disk, BUT those other programs are all sitting in the background not doing anything, and this app still fits in the 1GB space, then you will probably see a performance drop. Example: you keep several browser windows open, and an instant messenger, and a few other tools, then you start up a game that uses 800MB of memory. Most of the data from the other apps will be swapped to disk, but as long as you stay in the game, and those other apps aren't actually doing anything (such as the browser refreshing ads or running a Java applet), it really doesn't matter that they're paged to disk, and you've got enough memory to play the game just fine. Moving to single-channel from dual-channel would result in a performance loss within the game, BUT you'd have faster load times, and faster resumption of other apps when you quit the game or if you alt-tab out of the game to another app.

 

[slightlyhuman]

do you think bf2 will run a lot better?

i'll be running low/medium settings..

i don't think my cpu or vid card is bottle necking me?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Many people claim tremendous performance increases going from 1GB to 2GB with modern games. Running on low settings it's unlikely you'll see any improvements, medium settings might see some improvement. If your entire system is seeing performance issues, then you ought to work on determining exactly what the slowdown is, whether it is in fact due to low memory causing the pagefile to be used excessively, and if this is perhaps caused by an application or driver which has memory management or memory leaking issues. If memory usage isn't actually the problem, then more memory isn't going to make any difference.