When is buying RAM too much????

[webe3]

I was wondering....at what point is there that you say I have enough RAM on my machine and don't need to buy more??? (Sorry mods if I am in the wrong place, I couldn't find a place on the board to talk about RAM, if you have to move this, just let me know where and I will go there) I am talking about the average joe that plays games, uses some word processing, apps, etc. NOT corporate use or other use in a completely different need category! I am wondering for instance what is the best possible minimum amount of RAM you can have for the average user(be it SDRAM or RDRAM or DDR) and STILL have plenty to do all the things you need your machine to do? I mean a good "rule of thumb"...... 128?, 256, 512 or more??....or does it just depend upon each configuration of each user(OS and all of that)?? For example,when win 95 was first introduced, I think it would only use up to 512mb of SDRAM....anything after that was not really used by the OS....you just had more RAM on your machine(somebody correct me if I am wrong on this) Of course 512 mb in THOSE days cost an arm and a leg!! Somebody told me that it was because one of the factories that made RAM for the entire US had a fire and everything was destroyed and only TWO others were producing RAM at that time....don't know if this is true. Currently in my soyo SY K7VTA Pro motherboard, it will hold, 1.5 GIG of ram. I run win xp pro and do normal things with my machine like the ones mentioned above....but even if I purchased 1.5 gig of SDRAM what would be the benifits for EVERYDAY use????? (SDRAM is what my motherboard takes and uses an AMD athlon xp 2000 processor) I currently have 360 mb of SDRAM and my machine runs great! Do people that use the 1.5 gig of ram run things such as servers??? That is the only thing I can think of that might even be able to use such massive amouts of memory........just wondering.......

[JealousMidget]

I don't know what the memory limitations of win95 was - I was still using Macs before win98. :hammer: I believe the "recommended" max for '98 is 256M. With WinXP, I believe what your motherboard can handle will be the limiting factor. Mine can take 3Gig. :eek: Short of some type of server, you should have no use of 1.5G. For what you mentioned, the "average" user would be fine at 128M and wouldn't notice a jump to 256M. As the "average" user leans more towards a "gamer," probably 256M would be a better place to sit. If a lot of video editing is in order, it would probably push the comfort zone to 512M. Beyond that I would guess is just fluff. As you get into gaming and editing, your video card (with dedicated video ram) will probably be a very significant factor. I mostly play games and surf on my main machine and I find the 256M of DDR to be more than sufficient for that purpose.

For the average user, I don't think they would notice a difference between SDR and DDR.

Just my thoughts, I would expect some other to chime in.
JM :afro:

[Darthtanion]

JM has pretty much gotten you on the straight and narrow. Any of the older Win9x platforms don't use over 256MB effectively. There are even some systems that I have seen that start to crater if you go beyond that 256MB window, so that's about all you can get from that.

For the newer platforms using the NT shell (Win2k, WinXP), you have a much greater amount of flexibility in the memory usage. The operating system is more robust in it's memory handling chores, so you can push the limits a lot farther. To give an example of this, I'll use WinXP as the platform since it is currently the most used OS out there at the moment. Windows has stated in some of their white papers that WinXP will handle upwards of 16GB of RAM. That's right; 16GB! Of course, unless you're running a very high end server system, you won't get anywhere near that mark. On most modern motherboards, WinXP has been compatible with 4GB of memory.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you'll get huge improvements with more memory. MaximumPC has done some testing within the past 6-8 months or so and came up with a sweet spot of 512MB. You will normally get noticeable improvements up to this point, but the gains will dwindle down for memory amounts higher than this. One noticeable exception to this was Photoshop because of its memory-intensive workload. It will make good use of larger amounts of memory, but the average user won't get enough additional performance over 512MB to justify the added cost.

Also keep in mind that there are certain hardware limitations that may have to be considered as well. A lot of motherboards put restrictions on the type and/or size of memory modules in the board. Example... a motherboard has four RAM slots but requires DIMM modules in the first two slots of no larger than 256MB and either a DIMM module in the third slot or a pair of SIMM modules in slots three and four. As you can see, there may be a certain amount of research necessary of the mainboard to see if this applies to you.

[The__tweaker]

If you run a via based motherboard it is a possibility that win98 could cause some problems if the amount of mem is greater than 256 mb. This is a well known problem that i have seen on some systems with via chipset. But it is also true that 98 does'nt handle a big amount of mem as well as newer platforms, like xp etc...
;)

[webe3]

Yeah, I figured that as far as win xp went, that 512 mb should be enough....just wanted to know though....interesting test results though....I guess pretty much if you have 512mb of ANY RAM you will be OK for regular applications or gaming on most Operating Systems. Thanks for the replies.

[Andy72]

I agree, with winxp 512 mb of ram is enough. Actually I didn't notice any difference with 384 or 512 but I've read few articles confirming that 512 is the number.
But have to say that from my own experience that just adding 32Mb to 256 totalling 288Mb made a huge impact on how the WinXP worked. I know it sounds silly but it really did.
IMO everyone running WinXP with only 256 Mb are not running their OS as fast as they could.

Just my 2 cents ..


Andy

[The__tweaker]

I'm using 256 mb of ram and i score MUTCH higher with xp than i do with 98se. But the p4 owners often experience this because xp is in many ways written and designed for p4 based systems.
In a couple of weeks i will run 512 mb rdram instead of 256 and that should make me score even higher with xp i hope.



:geek:

[Ehhe Yebeb]

Just like 512MB is "The number" for DDR Ram, the same number for RDRam is 384MB

[HackofDestruct]

people people :no: :no:



have you ever heard of a ram disk its like a hard drive but much faster and it clears when you reboot its helpfull for temp files to get cleared and all the other things you do not want found you could even install a game on them like quake 3 and have unreal framerates that would just amazingly high because of the extra speed so i say go with as much ram as you can afford to buy and then buy more

[Beefy]

Not very efficient for the standard user though... Plus, to install a game like Quake 3 and have it run at the same time, you'd want at least 1GB of RAM... and if it's only to play quake, then what's the point. Plus it would be gone the next time you booted.

[DigitalDD]

Well i can say this much on Win98/98SE/ or ME I've never been able to get a box to boot into windows with more than 768MB. And these machines have rarely been stable with more than 512 MB.

The NT Based kernels of WinNT/2K/ & XP seem fine with up to 2GB. I've seen some multiprocessor NT & 2K servers with over 4GB RAM on special motherboards [not off the shelf OEm stuff].

[Ehhe Yebeb]

Im sure if registered modules were being used then it would be perfectly stable, but usually when you populate all DIMM slots with unbuffered then it will be unstable.

[drpeterbright]

I had vast improvement under Win XP when I went from 256 to 512 of RDRAM but no perceptible difference when I went from 512 to 1024.

[Andy72]

Just a note , when I talked about increase in speed I meant pure WinXP speed. This added-memory-increased-XP-speed will not always transfer to games or 3d benchmarks.


Andy

[E^vol]

if only ram prices would drop back down to what they were in early spring....:cry: