RAM Upgrade

[Menace]

Hey guys, here's the deal:

My current system:

9700 Pro (slightly clocked)
2600+ @ 2.15ghz
2x512mb of ram (PC3200, 400Mhz)

My plan:

to fill up my last ram slot (I have 3) with another 1GB of ram (PC3200, 400Mhz, so the same frequency) so I have 2gb of ram total.

My question:

Do you think this upgrade is worth it in terms of boosting performance in windows as well as games?
I know WoW takes a shiatload of ram (1gb being absolutely nothing) but I also know that my 3d card and processor might be bottlenecks anyway.

So is it worth spending the €117.50 on 1gb of additional ram?

In any way I can't afford additional system upgrades at the time, but doubling my ram is a good start, no?

 

[Nephilim]

http://www.planet3dnow.de/artikel/hardware/2gb_ram/img/3dmark05.png

http://www.planet3dnow.de/artikel/hardware/2gb_ram/img/csreload.png

http://www.planet3dnow.de/artikel/hardware/2gb_ram/img/bfreload.png

1 GB is just the right amount these days. It's pointless to buy an extra GB if you dont do video-cutting and that kind of stuff.
additionally, in your system you will lose the DualChannel advantage which will make upgrading even more worthless...

 

[Menace]

Alright, thanks for the info

 

[Menace]

Now I'm unsure again though...
I noticed that all the applications in those benchmarks are _very_ unlikely to ever use over 1gb of ram (they won't, in fact.) and I just ran a test save-game of black&white 2, the end of a world where everything slows down to almost full-stop for me (1fps, NOTHING more) and I saw in my ram counter that B&W2 was using over 800mb of ram and I had less than 60mb (!) remaining. This all after a fresh boot of windows with no other programs running or even starting up for that matter.

So I think it's something different than zipping a file or running a GFX benchmark.

 

[Martz]

It doesn't mean to say you should buy more RAM though.

B&W2 could have memory leaks or be inefficient at using RAM. When you run low on ram that your system can use - it usually begins using the swap file resulting in slower performance as a hard disk is slower than RAM. Only when that is happening, should you (imo anyway) think about upgrading RAM.

Forget whichever crap RAM manager program you have. If anything it is probably making things worse.

 

[Menace]

I know. Only installed it to do a short performance test.

 

[Fin]

I'm thinking about upgrading to 2gb, too.
WoW is using an assload of ram and since it is not the only program that I have running my harddisk is nothing but swapping. Esp. if you do a lot of taskswitching to read forums/irc, post screenshots, or do whatever else.

That charts that Neph posted are not really applicable in this case.

 

[Menace]

WoW is absolutely UNPLAYABLE in Ironforge on my laptop with 512mb of ram.
I still get assraped by the infamous IF lag when I have to walk through 200 players spamming their shit on my home PC, too ;D

 

[Rob1000100]

WoW? World of Wankers

If ram is the bottleneck like in Fins case go for the upgrade, if its not just keep it to 1GB

 

[Nephilim]

just for the record, I believe BF2 does need a lot of RAM so it fits the topic rather well IMO (besides, the reviewers there didnt run any other "new" games)

 

[Menace]

just for the record, I believe BF2 does need a lot of RAM so it fits the topic rather well IMO (besides, the reviewers there didnt run any other "new" games)

BF2 is a piece of cake compared to WoW or B&W2

 

[Nephilim]

I never pld either tbh