RAM

[Michael Smith]

I have a computer that is in need of a memory upgrade. It has a 2ghz athlon
xp processor and currently 128mb DIMM 133Mhz ram. I now have the dilemma to
choose whether to upgrade to either:
-256mb DDR (266) [Cost £31]
-or add a 256mb stick of DIMM ram to the current giving me 384MB [Cost £33].

Which of the two options would you recommend for me? I plan to use it to
play Sim City 4.

Cheers in Advance
Boffy

 

[DaveW]

To use DDR you'd need a new motherboard if you're using SDRAM now.

 

[philo]

To use DDR you'd need a new motherboard if you're using SDRAM now.

some boards can take *either* type but they are not usually mixable

 

[mjdale3]

some boards can take *either* type but they are not usually mixable

If your going to be playing Sim City 4 you need as much as the board
will handle, the games a pretty big memory hog

 

[Michael Smith]

My board can take both types i was just asking whether or not its better to
have an extra 128mb or whether it would be better to have less but DDR.

Boffy

 

[Mike Walsh]

133 Mhz RAM is too slow for a 2 Ghz processor. I would go with DDR RAM.

 

[Michael Smith]

Im getting some mixed responses some say more is better does it help if i
mention that my OS is Windows ME?

Boffy

 

[Mike Walsh]

More is better up to the point that your OS and applications will make use of the RAM. If the OS and applications you are running at any time use less than 256 MB then having 384 MB will not help anything. You can check on your memory usage with Sysmon, Wintop, or any number of other utilities. WinMe and WinXP are memory hogs compared to e.g. Win95 or WinNT, but still 256 MB might be all you need.

 

[kony]

Im getting some mixed responses some say more is better does it help if i
mention that my OS is Windows ME?

Boffy

If you're only running a few small jobs, 256MB should be sufficient,
but these days it's quite easy to exceed using 256MB of memory, and if
you run the system for longer periods of time (more than a couple
hours) you'll have the extra memory caching files, reducing HDD
access. If it were me, forced to choose I'd go with the 384MB of
PC133, though it's possible that will reduce gaming performance a bit,
on any game (+ OS) that only needs < 256MB. That might be roughly 8%
performance loss compared to DDR memory, but if you ever start
swapping virual memory to the hard drive, suddenly the performance is
horrible, to many people that's a more annoying performance drop
because you're left waiting on the HDD I/O over and over again on
larger jobs.

On the other hand, if you had any desire to upgrade the motherboard &
CPU anyttime soon, you might instead look at getting a 512MB module of
DDR, PC2700-3200 with the idea of reusing it in the next motherboard.


Dave

 

[stacey]

Im getting some mixed responses some say more is better does it help if i
mention that my OS is Windows ME?

With windows 9X (includes ME) 256 is plenty for most applications, photo
shop with huge files is about the only exception most people would run
into. I'd done video editing etc with 98 and 256 meg and unless you have a
TON of crap running in e background, it's plenty.

 

[Alfred Klek]

well, i'm running 512Mb of PC2100 DDR and i've never come close to maxing it
out (1.33 GHz athlon thunderbird, ATA100, an infinate number of monkeys
typing shakespeare word for word, and yes i know i'm obsolete damnit). my
guess is that this is due to the fact that the RAM is not my system
bottleneck. IOW, there is something else in my comp that is slowing down
the computer more than the RAM could if it was given the chance, most likely
the hdd or the cpu. RAM is fast, that's why we like it, and if it is as
fast as the rest of your comp, then it isn't going to fill itself up. to
make a long stupid story short, get the ddr. BTW, i have a board with SDRAM
and DDR support too(asus a7a266), DDR was the first upgrade i made. the
second one i made was the monkeys.
alfred klek