What did you see as in performance when upgrading from 512ram to 1G ram?

[Jincuteguy]

For those of you who has upgraded from 512Mb memory to 1G, what did you see the differeneces as in performance, loading applications, video editing, games. etc. Let say you upgraded from Corsair TwinX LL 512 to TwinX LL 1G.

 

[Hanzou]

It's faster in loading the large maps in games such as Battlefield 1942 and Sim City 4.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Anything large you open once (assuming you have RAM space still unused) will be cached into the RAM and so launching it afterwards will be even faster.

 

[Jincuteguy]

what about game performance???? and about how much faster were you guys saying?

 

[Schadenfroh]

several fps in 1942

 

[Jincuteguy]

so how much faster when u load an application with 1G? just approximate it.
And also, overall performance of the whole system is much faster than 512ram right?

 

[mechBgon]

Launching PhotoImpact 6 from a 15000rpm SCSI drive: ~4 seconds
Launching PhotoImpact 6 after it's cached in RAM: ~1 second

 

[Jincuteguy]

so it's only faster once you already launched the applications? (after cached in ram)

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Jincuteguy
so it's only faster once you already launched the applications? (after cached in ram)

Essentially correct, yeah. The first launch has to come from the hard drive, and even 512Mb is enough space for any single app of mine to launch comfortably. The next launch will come at RAM speed, and that app will keep launching at RAM speed afterwards until either I reboot, or until the OS has to bump that app off the stack to cache something else. Interestingly, even logging off doesn't seem to clear the cacheing, usually.

I've used from 256Mb to 1.5Gb with Win2000, and I don't think you're going to see much change in how Windows runs ordinary desktop stuff between 512Mb and 1024Mb. When the extra makes a difference is when either the application can use the extra RAM to avoid paging to disk (examples already given in the form of BF1942, SimCity 4 is said to be another, and heavy video-editing, photo-editing or audio-editing work come to mind as well), or when it can cache stuff in RAM for fast re-launch. Or those are the situations I can think of, anyway.

Now that a couple of games have gone as far as BF1942 and SimCity 4 have, we can probably expect more games that benefit from a jump to 1024Mb.

 

[ethebubbeth]

I gained about 250 points in 3dmark2001, but that's mostly because i had one 512mb stick and went to 2x512, enabling dual channel mode on my nforce2 board.

 

[Jincuteguy]

cool, thx for the infos
So if i want to launch applications fast for the first launch, then I will have to get a fast hardrive right? so the faster the hardrive, the faster they will launch for first strike right?

 

[ethebubbeth]

yup

 

[Chaotic42]

I went from 768 to 1280, and it was a pretty big jump, especially in video games, Photoshop, and The GIMP.

 

[0roo0roo]

its not so much about loading, but when if ever your app will start to chug as it runs out of memory or needs to load more.

 

[ElFenix]

faster application switching when using lots of ram

 

[Jincuteguy]

thx for all the infos guys, if anyone else has more , plz feel free to post here thx.

 

[Jeff7]

I went from 512MB to 1GB, and I don't notice a whole lot of performance change. But you can be assured that you can run just about as much junk as you want, plus a RAMdrive, and still not have to worry about using the hard drive instead of RAM.

 

[Whitedog]

Not fair for me to comment as I went from 512MB PC133 to 1GB PC2700 NForce2 dual channel. :Q

Completely blew my mind.

 

[buleyb]

I saw nothing as far as general usage when I pushed my P4 1.7 w/ 512 DDR to 1GB DDR, unless I was using Matlab, and running my test apps that were pushing for 800-900MB of space per run...at least they finish now

 

[galt]

absolutely nothing. matter of fact, i was so unimpressed, i made a 512mb ramdrive and used it for playing around. i dont use any memory intensive applications though. i use xp, and play quake and ut2k3. no photoshop or video editing or anything of that sort.

 

[Fallengod]

You dont notice any difference, the only thing it helps is relaunching programs a second time. All the people who said they noticed a big difference in fps or some shizzle dont have a clue.

 

[Auric]

Originally posted by: modempower
You dont notice any difference, the only thing it helps is relaunching programs a second time. All the people who said they noticed a big difference in fps or some shizzle dont have a clue.

Yeah, unless the system is misconfigured or has some other problem I don't see how it could make any difference. I have heard it said that BF1942 maps load faster but how much faster? Instead of 20s it takes 10s? I doubt it. The storage system (HDD) is the limiting factor. In fact, I created a local game of BF1942 El Alamein just now to see how much system memory it used and it was 234MB (much more than if just joining a game). Even with loads of other crap running there was still some to spare with a total of 512MB. Even if it had gone over it would just be a matter of moments to make use of the swap. So, if you want to spend some money on quicker loads then go for a better HDD, otherwise plow it into better actual in-game performance on a better graphics card or even a CPU.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Auric

Originally posted by: modempower
You dont notice any difference, the only thing it helps is relaunching programs a second time. All the people who said they noticed a big difference in fps or some shizzle dont have a clue.

Yeah, unless the system is misconfigured or has some other problem I don't see how it could make any difference. I have heard it said that BF1942 maps load faster but how much faster? Instead of 20s it takes 10s? I doubt it. The storage system (HDD) is the limiting factor. In fact, I created a local game of BF1942 El Alamein just now to see how much system memory it used and it was 234MB (much more than if just joining a game). Even with loads of other crap running there was still some to spare with a total of 512MB. Even if it had gone over it would just be a matter of moments to make use of the swap. So, if you want to spend some money on quicker loads then go for a better HDD, otherwise plow it into better actual in-game performance on a better graphics card or even a CPU.

Weird, I tested it out on El Alamein and my usage was 900-950 MB in game.

 

[Auric]

Can you say: "memory leak"? Something is wrong there anyway 'cause I have a fixed pagefile of 400MB (some apps and games seem to require knowing that much is available even if they don't need strictly need it -OFP was one). That means the total available is no more than 750 so BF1942 would simply not run if it needed anywhere near your usage. That pretty much discounts any difference in how we may have got the useage numbers but for the record I took them from Task Manager and assume you did likewise anyway. Anyone else got some memory usage numbers to add?

 

[neutralizer]

It will when I go from 512 MB to 1 GB RAM for my i865pe's dual channel mode.