2GB or 4GB of ram?

wilson82

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Jan 18, 2007
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Hey guys im about to upgrade my RAM and cannot decide between the G.SKILL F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ PC2-6400 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-800 CL5-5-5-15 240PIN Dual Channel Memory Kit or go for the Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X2048-9136C5DF 2GB 2X1GB PC2-9136 DDR2-1142 CL 5-5-5-15-2T 240PIN Dual Memory Kit

I plan on running vista in a few weeks and am most certainly upgrading to the r600's when they come out.. So i cant decide between 2 gigs of fast really overclockable ram or 4 gigs or good ram. They both have there pros and cons. Anyone have any suggestions?
 
Depending on what you're doing, if it's ram intensive i would definitely go for it. I plan on putting 8 gigs in my next gaming machine this summer when i build it.
 
if you go for more than 2gb, be aware that you need 64bit vista.

at the moment, i see no reason to go more than 2gb yet. parhaps there will be some games in the future that like 4gb, but it shouldn't be for a while yet.
 
Thanks for the replies. I finally decided id wait down the road to go for a 4GB package when they come out with some sweet sweet setups. For now Im upgradin from my OCZ GX XTC PC2-5400 2GB setup to the Corsair XMS2 Dominator TWIN2X2048-6400C4D 2GB PC6400 DDR2-800 CL 4-4-4-12 240PIN. Should run vista 64bit fine, and overclock niiice. This should keep me happy for a few months.
 
Yeah. Since many motherboards has 4 DIMM slots, you can upgrade to 4 Gb down the road and start with a 2 Gb set.

Myself, I'm probably going with the Corsair Dominator 6400C4D 2 Gb as well.
 
Isn't 32 bit Vista still limited to something like 3 gigs, because of that memory issue? I don't know much about it, but from what I understand--and do correct me if I am wrong--4 gigs can't be utilized in 32-bit XP or Vista.
 
Isn't 32 bit Vista still limited to something like 3 gigs, because of that memory issue? I don't know much about it, but from what I understand--and do correct me if I am wrong--4 gigs can't be utilized in 32-bit XP or Vista.

yup, you got to go 64bit for the full 4gb or more.
 
You guys are wrong, 32 bit windows CAN use 4Gb memory. google 4Gb memory limit.

XP sees no real improvements for more than 2Gb UNLESS you really have alot of stuff open. Gaming won't use it yet.

Vista is a little different. Even the 32bit Vista runs considerably better when jumping from 2Gb to 3GB RAM and not much improvement with 4Gb BUT the fact is a 32 bit processor can properly use 4GB RAM without any tricks. Read that recent Vista article on anandtech. It's the SuperFetch that makes the difference. Basically if you have a ton of RAM it'll autoload a bunch of apps into your RAM which I don't really like that much but for most people this rocks and most of the time if you have 3Gb of RAM 2Gb isn't even being used.

My suggestion though is similiar... I say buy 2Gb of the fastest you can afford/use and buy another 2Gb later on. In my main system i use 2*1Gb + 2* 512Mb only after doing some testing with 4Gb did I decide to back down to 3Gb for my main workstation and put the other memory in another box.
 
[ T ] A C O;1030585208 said:
Thats not what PC magazine and every other publication says. 3gig max for 32.

I think it can handle 4GB but that includes your video buffer, etc and they deduct from your system RAM.
 
I think it can handle 4GB but that includes your video buffer, etc and they deduct from your system RAM.
This is the correct answer.... If your video card has 512Mb RAM you'll end up with roughly 3.25Gb max RAM by time all the other things use up allocated addressing.

If you're like me and use a crappy video card because I don't game I'll be able to use more of my 4Gb RAM.
 
I just upgraded my ram to 4GB and Windows XP only sees 3.25GB of it. I've also got a 512MB 1900xtx video card. Not a big deal to me as I expected this and the 4GB upgrade was for Vista x64 which I'll be getting here shortly. I never needed more than 2GB for XP, even with the page file disabled.
 
I have 32bit vista with 2 gigs of ram... Vista is using atleast 500 megs of my ram 24/7.... Onstart-up it shows it being used ... with both my cores jumping between 0%-2% usage...

Start using programs and they both start bouncing around... when opening programs they jump to 99% and back down...

Vista is making use of the ram before you would actually use it... programs that would normally take 30-45 seconds to install... install in 1-2 seconds... It takes you longer to click "OK" and read all those agreements than it does to install any program...

I like Vista... a lot.. but I don't think I've ever seen my usage go up to 2 gigs... I do video editing, play games... whatever... I don't think it's ever used that much.
 
I plan on putting 8 gigs in my next gaming machine this summer when i build it.
8GB for gaming?? You're out of your fucking mind. The rest of your rig will be obsolete before you outgrow 4GB. In fact, if you've got enough money to blow on 8GB of RAM, chances are you'll be upgrading again before you outgrow 2GB.

Seriously, buy it when you need it. It'll be faster, and it'll be cheaper. Trying to futureproof a gaming machine is little different from flushing money down the toilet.
 
8GB for gaming?? You're out of your fucking mind. The rest of your rig will be obsolete before you outgrow 4GB. In fact, if you've got enough money to blow on 8GB of RAM, chances are you'll be upgrading again before you outgrow 2GB.

Seriously, buy it when you need it. It'll be faster, and it'll be cheaper. Trying to futureproof a gaming machine is little different from flushing money down the toilet.
yeah this post puts it nicely:
"Nice computer you have there!"
Thanks, I built it myself - let me show you the insides... That's a high end dual core E6600 cpu there, and it's seriously overclocked.
"Wow, cool. What's that accessory there? I've never seen that before"
That? Oh - that. That's for futureproofing. It's a giant wad of cash.

But I'd love to have 4-8GiB of RAM. Though if I ever were to think about that, I'd go with 4GiB to start and look how it goes.
 
So Vista 32-bit will be able to see a full three gigs if I go from 2gigs to 3, cause thats what I was planning on doing.
 
I'm on Vista 64bit and all is well with 2gb. I don't notice any slow down in games or excessive pagefile usage. I do have a 1gb usb flash drive ($20).

I was initially thinking about 4gb of ram but now I don't feel I need it.
 
I'm running Vista Business with 2gb of ram on my laptop, and I've had no problems. I would go with the 2gb of fast ram, as I think the extra speed will serve you better than the extra room. Besides, you can always add more ram later.
 
Ok guys i am having the same dilemma.I am currently running a Core Duo 6600,EVGA 8800 GTS Superclock(640 megs of ddr3 ram), and two gigs of Corsair pc6400 twinx2048c 4-4-4-12
ddr2 ram, and Vista 32bit.

I currently playing Vanguard and the game does make use of the new video card, but i think i am running into ram limitations, though i'm unsure.I am thinking of upgrading to another gig of the same type of ram or waiting a few months and upgrading to 4 gigabytes.

Should i simply sell the current ram and replace it with 2 gigs of the new 3-4-4-8 Corsair XMS Dominator,wait and upgrade to a 4 gig kit once more choices become available in a couple of months, or simply just add another gig of my current type of Corsair memory?

ANY advice is appreciated.
 
All 32-bit OS's are limited to 4GB of addressable memory and as someone said earlier, it includes the address space required for things like BIOS, Video RAM, and other things that may have accessible memory (X-RAM on the X-Fi's, memory on physics boards). Remember this gets deducted from the 4GB address pool, so if you have 4GB of RAM, you can never access all of it, since a portion of the 4GB address space will be taken by the above.

As for the original question, I would almost recommend 4GB of RAM for Vista 64. I've noticed that I've been frequently hitting the low 90% in RAM usage even when doing trivial things like patching with 2 GB. An article at Anandtech also seems to indicate that the sweet spot for Vista is around 3GB. I'll probably be moving to 4GB soon (like in an hour when I get off work) and we'll see if it alleviates the RAM usage and gives me some breathing room.
 
All 32-bit OS's are limited to 4GB of addressable memory and as someone said earlier, it includes the address space required for things like BIOS, Video RAM, and other things that may have accessible memory (X-RAM on the X-Fi's, memory on physics boards). Remember this gets deducted from the 4GB address pool, so if you have 4GB of RAM, you can never access all of it, since a portion of the 4GB address space will be taken by the above.

As for the original question, I would almost recommend 4GB of RAM for Vista 64. I've noticed that I've been frequently hitting the low 90% in RAM usage even when doing trivial things like patching with 2 GB. An article at Anandtech also seems to indicate that the sweet spot for Vista is around 3GB. I'll probably be moving to 4GB soon (like in an hour when I get off work) and we'll see if it alleviates the RAM usage and gives me some breathing room.

It scales. The less ram in your system, the less Vista uses. The more in your system the more vista will use. 2gb works great, and there really is not any need to have 4gb unless you want to run 3 instances of BF2.
 
For what it's worth, whatever Vista "sees", when I had 2gigs I usually showed around 50% memory used during normal use, now with 4gig I show about 25% used...so...does this mean vista sees it but isn't using it? Not sure about this prefetch thing...let me get my stopwatch out and open some programs. ;)

In any case I see NO performance benefit in FPS's or "feel" in Vegas or Oblivion, not that I had real issues to begin with. I guess I was irrationally hoping that Oblivion would feel smoother at times, I do suffer from the occasional stutter. No dice.
 
Yeah I'm averaging around 50% idle as well right now. During activity, I've been seeing it spike up to 90+% which I don't like. Particularly if I'm doing something trivial like installing a patch. I just want the headroom if I need it, since I do a little photochopping as well. Too bad the RAM I wanted is out of stock when I went to grab it earlier, I guess I'll have to wait until they bring it in or order online.
 
Yeah I'm averaging around 50% idle as well right now. During activity, I've been seeing it spike up to 90+% which I don't like. Particularly if I'm doing something trivial like installing a patch. I just want the headroom if I need it, since I do a little photochopping as well. Too bad the RAM I wanted is out of stock when I went to grab it earlier, I guess I'll have to wait until they bring it in or order online.


That's pretty much what i'm going through and don't think if i step up to only SLIGHTLY faster ram with the same amount of 2 gigs is going to do much of anything that i will notice.I'll likely wait until some better performing pc6400 4 gig sets come out(2-4 months should see quite a few new 4gig 2x2gig rams sets)and choose from there.At least by going that route i'll have the additional headroom Vista 64 can use when i eventually switch to it later in the year.
 
I am contemplating the jump to 4gb also. While BF2142 is running Vista x64 is reporting that a little more than 1.8gb of RAM is being used. I am sure that more RAM would be allocated for the game if it were there. It would be nice if there were more people that were not hypothetically speaking or just talking through their a$$ here. You are of little or no value to this thread if you are not already running Vista, preferably 64bit flavor.
 
Vista is a lot different than XP or 2k-- it'll use what it can get and if another process needs it, it'll release it. I'd say to leave it to how you feel about your system- if you think you're seriously running into some sort of bottleneck w/memory, add more.. if you're just looking at the system monitor biting your nails, then I don't really see any reason to do it.
 
I have 3GB of ram in my computer running vista and according to the task manager, only 305MB are available... I'm only actually using 40% of my physical RAM with the apps I have running, the rest of it is being used by Vista as cache.
 
There are a couple of good answers in here and a bunch that are not so good. Some of you fellers need to learn about operating system memory allocation, page files, and dynamic memory usage (see bottom of post). In short when you are not running some big application its not a big deal and actually is a good thing for the OS to grab memory and run some of its processes/utilites whatever in active memory. When you start your game the "junk" will have its memory footprint reduced and be paged to the drive. This is a super simple description just to alleviate all the "I only have xxx free memory and I am not doing anything" concerns.

You can never be too rich, too thin or have too much memory or too much harddrive space. However there are cost/benifits concerns but if you got the money and want to spend it 4GB wont hurt a bit as far as the OS is concerned. Your overclock might have to be reduced and in some cases the board wont boot at all. But there are a zillion threads on that a seach will turn out.



Here is the information from Microsoft, I think they might have some insight. And backing up the tree of links at the top of the page will bring you to some information on the entire Windows OS memory managment scheme and its not too technical, a good read if you would like to know how it really all works.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366521.aspx

Here are memory limits by OS.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx


Information specific to vista I could link for you was harder to find but I would be amazed it Vista 32 was less capable than XP 32. Note that you can set applicaions to use 3GB and the 4th is used by the OS as indicated by a couple of previous posts, the 4th GB is by no means wasted even if your game cant use it.

Is it needed (4GB) or cost effective or make a difference ? Depends. For gaming, probally not now.
 
I currently playing Vanguard and the game does make use of the new video card, but i think i am running into ram limitations, though i'm unsure.I am thinking of upgrading to another gig of the same type of ram or waiting a few months and upgrading to 4 gigabytes.


I have the same problem with Vanguard myself in that i is pegged at about 95% usage when playing the game. I believe if I had more ram, that it would utilize it.
 
This is the correct answer.... If your video card has 512Mb RAM you'll end up with roughly 3.25Gb max RAM by time all the other things use up allocated addressing.
Right. I explain what's going on in the Understanding Address Spaces and the 4GB Limit essay I wrote last summer.

If you've got a decent graphics card, I'd stick with 3 gigs of physical memory. If you're running an integrated graphics card (like the 8 meg ATI Rage setup I had on the server I used when I wrote that article), or have HyperCache or TurboMemory, then you should go for 4 gigs of physical memory.

You should also go for 4 gigs if you're intending to move to a 64-bit OS, or if you know your hardware and software will support PAE under a 32-bit OS.
 
32bit desktop versions of windows will suffer from the same problems eventually. If you are thinking about going with a large amount of ram in your box and you are going to buy 2 phat video cards then you will be very sad if you are stuck in 32bit. 2 8800GTXs will eat half of the aval ram allocation and you still have to account for all the other devices. When all is said and done you dont have as much space for the game to play. but are we there yet?

Lets talk about reality instead of theory.

I have 1 8800gts, 680i and 2gb of OCZ plat.

I dual boot Vista 32 ultimate and Vista 64 Ultimate.

So i decided to setup a typical session for me and check the resource monitor. Here are the screen shots. I have 2 sessions of IE open. In one I have a video loaded up, im on the LOTR beta forums, and this post is open. The other has New Egg , CNN and Youtube. I have rss feeds on the desktop, clock, weather and notepad. I have Windows media player open with a high def video. I loaded the LOTR beta because their forums are full of complaints that the game is a resource HOG and you need really supreme hardware to run it. (its running at ultra high, 1600x1200, 4xaa)

Vista 64
v64load.jpg


Vista32
vista32load.jpg


As you can see from the screen shots V32 looks to give a tad more headroom than V64. Less crap loading is my guess. I havent tweaked either OS yet so YMMV.

Just for kicks I also fired off a DVD burn and a MSDN DVD ISO download as well as bit torrent. With the video playing, the game running , the open IE sessions nothing failed to work. The game played fine. The DVD burned ok. I would not normally have all this going on if I wanted to really play a game but its nice to know I can. If you kill all the crap i had going on in the background you get about %10-15 of your resources back. That comes out to about 600 or so MB of physical memory that is going un-used.

Here is what I did and would recomend to others. Dont waste the money on fast ram. Grab 2Gb of fairly inexpensive memory that works at the native buss of your proc. Buy V64. Buy a single DX10 card.

Why?

Prices are going to come down on RAM and Vid Cards. SLI isnt up to snuff yet and 32 bit OSes are going to hit some hard realities when you stick SLIed configs. I dont know why there is only 768mb of ram on the gtx card but I think it may have something to do with the fact that if you run SLI 2x768 and then add 2GB of memory you are knocking on the door and may have bounced off of the XP and V32 memory address limits. This means that should a game come out that needs another 300megs its going to your pagefile.

Watch for the sales and when the price is right snatch up 4GB of fast ram, 2GB of cheap ram or another DX10 card when you need it. Figure out what your budget can afford.

If your not on a budget buy 2 8800GTX and 4Gb of the fastest memory you can. You probably wont have to upgrade anything for 2 years or more.

Bottom line is 2GB is plenty for TODAY 2/20/07 under Vista32 or Vista64.
 
Bottom line is 2GB is plenty for TODAY 2/20/07 under Vista32 or Vista64.
This may or may not be true; it really depends on what the machine's used for.

As you can see from the screen shots V32 looks to give a tad more headroom than V64.
Er, I can't see that from what you've posted.

The Memory graph here shows the rate of page faults. Since you're not even running the same set of applications at the time the two different screen shots were taken, you're really comparing apples and oranges. Same for the "used physical memory" number: one shows 72% and the other shows 79%. If you've got two gigs of memory, a difference of 7% is about 143 megs -- a difference that's easily explainable by the different applications you do and don't have loaded in the two different sessions, not to mention that native 64-bit applications have larger code and data sizes.

What was it that you were looking at to draw that conclusion?
 
This was a quick way to show that not only can you have the game open but a whole slew of other apps going on in the background without crushing the resources that 2Gb will provide in either V64 or V32.

The same types of things are running. I do not know why there is a discrepancy in how the game trailer video was in WMP for V64 and IE for V32. For example you have to open the task manager to get to the resource monitor and I had task manager open for both.

Either way this is not meant to be scientific its a quick "real world" test scenario. Open similar things, see whats left.

Honestly I dont care that the 64bit code is larger, or that I was in a more black section of the video in one picture vs the other which could account for more disk access, or that there were 8 characters on screen vs 20. This isnt about trying to squeeze every drop from the system. This is showing that on the 2 completely unmodified versions of vista ultimate, 2GB of ram is enough to run a highly demanding game and several other applications. I noticed no problems with the game or applications.

Note the: your milage may vary

I dont want to nor care to get extremely detailed in this analysis. I do that daily at work. So if you want to analyze it then do it FTW! I really dont care.

So lets assume also that we are talking about a game rig, per everyone talking about gaming and gaming cards and how much ram for games.

If you want to talk about application of the rig then really we move out of the game rig discussion and into the realm of workstations and servers that have no business running either of the operating systems listed "yet". Why someone would run windows Vista on their ecommerce solution I couldnt tell but I know its way out of scope for this thread and this discussion.

Since you brought it up though if your building a workstation or server the answer is aways buy as much ram as your opperating system and hardware platform can support or that you can afford. With some of todays workstations and servers the wallet will give out before ability to support more ram.
 
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