Memory advice

Hi, was wondering if I could get some advice on a memory purchase.

I currently have a core 2 duo 1.86 ghz with 2*1gb of corsair xms2 ddr-667. My motherboard can take 800 but it was quite a bit more expensive at the time so went for the lower speed.

Now I am running windows 7 and right now I'm using 61% of the memory whilst not doing a great deal so thought an upgrade would be in order.
Is upgrading to ddr-800 worth it? Or should I just buy another 2*1GB?

Also should I try and find the same RAM so the latencies and such match up? Or can I get any decent 2GB set?

Thanks, Olie

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Originally Posted by krazy_olie

Hi, was wondering if I could get some advice on a memory purchase.

I currently have a core 2 duo 1.86 ghz with 2*1gb of corsair xms2 ddr-667. My motherboard can take 800 but it was quite a bit more expensive at the time so went for the lower speed.

Now I am running windows 7 and right now I'm using 61% of the memory whilst not doing a great deal so thought an upgrade would be in order.
Is upgrading to ddr-800 worth it? Or should I just buy another 2*1GB?

Also should I try and find the same RAM so the latencies and such match up? Or can I get any decent 2GB set?

Thanks, Olie

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Are you having an noticable perform problems with your current RAM? Are you sure the bottleneck you are experience is in fact your RAM?

Sometimes what feels like a RAM bottleneck to the untrained eye will actually be a HDD bottleneck because of pre-emptive swapping. A RAM bottleneck is generally quite hard to detect through, so if it's noticable, 99% of the time more RAM, not faster RAM, will fix the bottleneck.

So if you are experience noticable bottleneck, like it takes a long time to switch between applications, then you need more RAM. Faster RAM can't hurt, and I always recommend that if you can afford it go for faster RAM. So if you are not exeperiences noticable bottlenecks, then go for it, get some 800MHz CL4 RAM. ;)

Don't forget that Windows 7 automatically fetches quite a lot of files into memory, so while it says 61% used it might be that some of that is stuff that's memory resident but not active - this speeds up loading times when you do use those files / programs.

Also, let's not forget that you have 39% of your RAM free, which is almost 800MB in your case, so I'd be surprised if you really need more memory. I know it's tempting to upgrade constantly, but unless you are experiencing genuine performance issues I wouldn't advise it...

You not going to see any performance increases by installing faster RAM.

The only reason to upgrade your current RAM to 800 would be if your system had issues running the 667 and the 800 ram side-by-side.

This isn't normally an issue but if it is, setting the ram speed manually (in the BIOS) to the slowest of the 2 should resolve any issues.

AFAIK the new memory handling in vista/win7 works that way, ie always caches 60%ish of the RAM, so you may fine putting in another 2gb will still leave you around 60% used.

If you are having performance issues then it's probably ether the hard drive (esp if it's ide) or that 1.86ghz cpu.
As has been said getting 800mhz ram and underclocking it to 667mhz will not be a problem as long as you manually set the speed in the bios.

Thanks I guess I'll leave it for now then, I'm not noticing anything particularly slow about windows, but I haven't tried anything intensive yet so will wait and see.