2GB of RAM effective with XP?

[Steve Marshall]

I have one GB of PC3200 DDR SDRAM installed now on XP Pro system. I am a
hard core gamer and wonder is it worth it to add another 1GB stick?

System is:

P4 3.06 GHz cpu HT
eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra
3 HDD's - two Ultra 160 SCSI's, one ATA 100
Audigy 2ZS Sound Card
480 watt Thermaltake PSU
Sony GD-520P 21" flat monitor
Plextor CDRW 52x

 

[John R Weiss]

I have one GB of PC3200 DDR SDRAM installed now on XP Pro system. I am a hard
core gamer and wonder is it worth it to add another 1GB stick?

Do your games access the pagefile excessively? If not, 1 GB should be plenty,
unless you run background programs while gaming.

 

[Jerry]

If you want to have your memory take full advantage of its DDR function two
sticks are required. DDR (Dual Data Rate) will only function in Single Data
Rate mode with one stick. Two sticks should increase throughput.

 

[Tom]

I am going to assume that you have 2-512meg sticks of that DDR Ram to make that 1gig, or it wouldn't work Dual Data Rate (DDR), rather in single mode. If your only doing gaming, and nothing too intense in the background you should be good. But another gig wouldn't hurt, and PC3200 DDR is fairly cheap now. You will have to match RAM to almost exactly, or XP will probably complain.

 

[Gary]

1GB RAM is plenty, invest in a faster processor, games love faster
processors and can't get enough speed.

 

[Steve Marshall]

Interesting point - what are my cpu upgrade options on a 478 pin
Gigabyte GA-8S648-L Mobo?

Also, it is one stick of 1GB PC 3200 DDR SDRAM.

Steve

 

[Ron Martell]

I have one GB of PC3200 DDR SDRAM installed now on XP Pro system. I am a
hard core gamer and wonder is it worth it to add another 1GB stick?

Adding more memory can noticeably improve performance only if the
added memory results in reduced usage of the virtual memory paging
file. Therefore if the paging file is not currently being used to any
significant extent then adding more memory will not provide a
significant improvement.

Unfortunately there is no ready way of determing actual paging file
usage provided with Windows XP - it does not have an equivalent to the
'Memory Manager - Swap File In Use" reporting provided by the System
Monitor utility in Windows 95/98/Me.

There is a free utility that you can download and run which will
provide this information for you. It was written by MVP Bill James and
you can get if from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm or from
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/

If that utility shows actual page file usage of 50 mb or more on a
regular basis then that is indicative of fairly significant paging
file activity. Adding more RAM will reduce or even eliminate entirely
this activity thereby improving performance.

This apples regardless of how much or how little RAM is currently
installed in the computer, at least up to the 4 gb RAM maximum for
Windows XP.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

 

[Steve Marshall]

Nice link - it works great. I will check it out as time goes by and see
what my max. page file usage is.

Steve

 

[Steve Marshall]

Ron Martell:

Just played a game (Half Life 2) for a while and my max. page file usage
was 97MB with a custom page file of 1534MB on non-OS drive.

Does that qualify?

Steve

 

[Thomas Wendell]

If you onluy use 97MB of the page file, even when playing, I don't think
another 1GB memory will do anything for you, EXCEPT that you can then set up
dual channel memory (in BIOS), which will speed up memory access a few
percent..


--
Tumppi
Reply to group
=================================================
Most learned on nntp://news.mircosoft.com
Helsinki, Finland (remove _NOSPAM)
(translations from FI/SE not always accurate)
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[Gary]

Steve,

Looks like Intel P4-Northwood 3.06G (HT) 533FSB is the highest speed
Pentium you can go to with your mobo. This is from the manufacturer's site.
Any other tweaks as discussed in this thread would only give you incremental
performance options of a few %. You have the fastest processor for your mobo
already.

http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Support/CPUSupportList/CPUSupportList_GA-8S648-L.htm

 

[Steve Marshall]

Thanks, Gary for your research; I came to the same conclusion after I
perused the Giga-Byte website.

It gets worse, too; if I want to upgrade to get the fastest processors
out there they want to be plugged into mobo's that use PCI-E video cards
and SATA HDD's, which I don't have.

Probably a couple of thousand dollars would be required to be on the
cutting edge of technology and I don't want to bleed that much right now.

 

[Steve Marshall]

Well, that is what I decided to do and have ordered another 1GB stick of
Crucial PC3200 DDR RAM to match the first one I have.

I will post back after install to let you know benchmarks.

 

[Ron Martell]

If you onluy use 97MB of the page file, even when playing, I don't think
another 1GB memory will do anything for you, EXCEPT that you can then set up
dual channel memory (in BIOS), which will speed up memory access a few
percent..

Your computer needed to move 97 mb of active memory content from RAM
to the page file so as to allow that RAM to be used for other,
currently more important tasks. And then it probably had to load at
least some of that memory content back into RAM when it was
subsequently needed again, after first moving some other active memory
items out to the page file to create the needed RAM space.

So your added RAM should pretty well eliminate this swapping,
providing some performance gains. Just how noticeable this will be is
hard to estimate.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

 

[Trent©]

Interesting point - what are my cpu upgrade options on a 478 pin
Gigabyte GA-8S648-L Mobo?

Also, it is one stick of 1GB PC 3200 DDR SDRAM.

Steve

As has been stated...

You should be running 2 sticks...one on each channel.


Have a nice one...

Trent

Budweiser: Helping ugly people have sex since 1876!