Where will I really see a performance increase from extra RAM

[KeyserSosa]

Will I notice a big performance gain in games and applications from upgrading from 128mb to 384mb or is it a superficial gain. Where will I really see a performance increase from increasing the amount of RAM in my system? My system is a Athlon 750, 20Gb 7200rpm HD, GeForce 1, Soundblaster Live. I'm guessing I will see a big increase in my ability to run multiple applications like graphics programs and MS Office but what about games? Is my graphics card the real bottle neck in that department?

 

[ledzepp98]

games won't really get a boost from more than 128megs...but going to 256megs will make for an overall smoother windows experience, mainly when multitasking and flipping between windows, not to mention running photoshop or programs like it. as for gaming, the original geforce 256, while it isn't that slow, is definately the gaming bottleneck

 

[smp]

Agreed. If you want to run a few programs at once and so on, then it's great. Monitor your system resources for the next few days while you're thinking about this. Watch your mem usage in task manager.... er, you're running win98 eh... well, figure out how to watch your mem usage while you use your machine and if you always have lots of memory left over, then you don't need more ram. IMO you should ditch 98, get some more ram and install win2k, IMO of course.

 

[KeyserSosa]

yes, I was contemplating doing the same thing as well... ditching Win98. However, I've heard that some things don't run so well on w2k if at all so I was probably going to run a duel boot system with win98 and 2000. Actually I might even make that a triboot system and throw linux red hat into the mix as well.

 

[hotmodpc]

firstly windows will not see a performance gain past 196mb ram. the exception to this is photoshop and video editing along with other ram eating progs. they will eat ram all day long, but windows wont benefit, and usually videogames are mainly bottlenecked by your gpu card. As far as win 2k goes its video game support is weak to say the least, win98se is so far the best most stable end user os as far as microsoft goes.
hope this helps.