recommend a Page file size in new system

[jeffchele]

Hello, i have a new system and would like to see what people recommend for my page file size. I have a amd athlon 64 x2 5200+ on a ecs ka3 mvp mobo. 2 drives a wd 250gb 7200rpm 8mb buffer and a hitachi 160gb 7200rpm 8mb buffer. I have windows xp media center but will be upgrading to Vista as soon as it arrives, its on order. I have 2.5 gb ram, 2x512 crucial matched pair, 1gb crucial single stick & 512mb adata single stick. Any recommendations for the page file and location. I am going to be putting the vista on the second drive, Hitachi, windows is on c: the WD drive right now.

[casecutter]

Re: recommend a Page file size in new system

I would recommend you sell all that mismatched ram and buy a good set of matched ram, preferably 2X1GB sticks. You are missing out on running dual channel which would give you a nice little boost and that CPU will also not like running 4 sticks of mismatched ram too easily. As for the page file, if your PC is using the page file, you need more ram. Otherwise, Windows configures it just fine.

[jeffchele]

Re: recommend a Page file size in new system

I would recommend you sell all that mismatched ram and buy a good set of matched ram, preferably 2X1GB sticks. You are missing out on running dual channel which would give you a nice little boost and that CPU will also not like running 4 sticks of mismatched ram too easily. As for the page file, if your PC is using the page file, you need more ram. Otherwise, Windows configures it just fine.

All this mismatched Ram is not a problem as I will probably be getting more sooner or later. I review stuff so what my system likes or doesn't like is no problem. I will be moving stuff around so often that for awhile mismatched memory will not be that big a deal. I was just wondering if I should have it set on the other drive and what size or just let windows deal with it. Thanks for the input.

[Kheldar]

Re: recommend a Page file size in new system

one of the drawback to putting your pagefile on a different HD, is that you must remember to put it back to the system disk if you want to remove it, otherwise bsod.

the usual rule of thumb if you double the amount of ram you have and set your pagefile to that, ie 5G in your case.

now this rule was used when we had bugger all ram not 2.5 G, so its hard to say how much to use, personally i'd leave in alone in a home/gaming environment.

Note XP doesn't really know how to use (effectively) more than 1G of ram, XP64 does and so does vista, so that help vista, but at the moment dual channel ram would do more good

[Yawgm0th]

Re: recommend a Page file size in new system

I don't know that I'd agree XP doesn't effectively use more than 1GB of RAM. Maybe you won't see much difference on a fresh install between the two, but once you get some background apps and multitasking going, the difference is night and day between 1GB and 2GB or more. I didn't notice any performance improvement when run XP Pro x64 and Server 2003 x64 over XP Pro and Server 2003, and I was running quite a bit. I might notice some right now if I had Server x64 instead of Server because of how much I'm running, but I'm not convinced 64-bit Windows is any faster unless you run 64-but applications or have over 2GB of RAM.

I agree with the double-the-RAM rule. I generally do 4GB. With 2.5GB or more, though, you probably don't need 4GB.

Installing the pagefile on a different HDD can provide significant performance improvement in some cases, but like Kheldar said, make sure it's not on a drive you plan on moving.

Mismatched RAM can cause problems, but if it's working, don't worry about it. Dual-channel does almost nothing on an Athlon 64 system, so you're not missing out much. That said, I still might remove the Adata stick. Your board might let you run dual-channel with 1gb in one channel and 2x512MB in the other, and that probably would run faster than having 2.5GB with all slots populated and three different modules.