Anyone fancy a small Challenge?

[Zak33]

Anyone got a PC with 2x512 sticks of serious ram with a nice vid card?

reason being I'd love it if someone could simply run 3dmark 2001 and 2003 with the following ram set ups.

1x512 SUPER TIGHT TIMINGS 6-2-2-2 or better
2x512 super slack timings 8-3-3-3 or lower.

Just to see WHAT advance the RAM QUANTITY gives over the TIMINGS.

Maybe even, if someone has a mobo that has the ram independant of Clock Speed....so the CPU is default, and then they can run 512 on the fastest speeds and timings...

and then 1gig on the lowest.

Just to see whether extra ram from 512 to 1gig is worthy of the money instead of buyingf less better quality ram

[noah]

that's a great idea, i've been wondering this for ages, i suspect the gig will be faster, but i'd love to find out for sure. would be even better if we could have tests on 2*256's against one 512 and 2*256's and a 512 against 2*512's as there seems to be loads of questions surrounding those scenarios lately

[Spunkey]

i can tell you right now that a 1.2Ghz AMD with 512Mb PC133 is faster than a 2500+ @ 2.2Ghz/256 PC3200 machine

I upgraded the other week, and I've been struggling along. Photoshop chugs, games become slideshows and i just get the finger when i try and use 3d Studio Max - this is at 2-3-3-10 as well. Thankfully another 512Mb arrived this morning so it'll be in this evening *phew*

I think with WinXP, up to about 768Mb Quantity > Speed. Its only above that point speed really makes a diff.

[shiato storm]

it seems no matter how much ram you have windows always takes vitual percentages and not an actual value of the ram. which really sucks! you have 512 it takes almost half. slap in 1g and it takes again more than previous (not quite half but still rises)...is it me or is winxp ram hungry?!

[Butcher]

Saw some benches of this a while back zak - it was a few percent at best for timings, don't recall where the benches were though.

[mike_w]

I suppose it depends on what you're using. However, from everything that I've seen, timings make very little difference, while more RAM is good so long as you actually have something that uses that much RAM.

[Zak33]

XP loves ram....loves it

[Spunkey]

true dat homie - just stuck the 512Mb stick i mentioned above in my machine. I just noticed the sound doesnt have a crackling anymore! I thought it was just my (bit naff) 6 year old SB Live Value soundcard, but it was windows stuggling with the memory/page file access with only 256Mb.

Ahhhh good old windows

@shiato:
i thought that too - my XP work machine has 1.2Gb of memory, ~550Mb is used just sitting in windows after booting. Although with this new 512Mb my used mem is still the same as it was when i had 256, its sitting around 130Mb

maybe it hasnt updated my page file settings yet.

[SilentDeath]

Anyone got a PC with 2x512 sticks of serious ram with a nice vid card?

reason being I'd love it if someone could simply run 3dmark 2001 and 2003 with the following ram set ups.

1x512 SUPER TIGHT TIMINGS 6-2-2-2 or better
2x512 super slack timings 8-3-3-3 or lower.

Just to see WHAT advance the RAM QUANTITY gives over the TIMINGS.

Maybe even, if someone has a mobo that has the ram independant of Clock Speed....so the CPU is default, and then they can run 512 on the fastest speeds and timings...

and then 1gig on the lowest.

Just to see whether extra ram from 512 to 1gig is worthy of the money instead of buyingf less better quality ram

Easy way to tell if you *need* more ram is how often your hdd goes in game. More ram and itll go down a lot. games like farcry.. hl2.. doom3.. everquest2 (probably more than the others) *need* 1gb to play properly.. 512mb wont do it.. but 768mb is playable..

Timings/FSB dont really make much differnce atall *exept* where they affect CPU clock speed (locked multi cpus).

[Rave]

Anandtech did a good test of how HL2 performance is affected by timing recently. Pretty much all the guys who go for 3Dmark01 records use 2x256 sticks to get uber tight timings, although apparently Oppainter's current record was achieved with 2x512.

As for 3Dmark03, it'll make very little difference since the benchmark is almost entirely GPU limited (as is '05).

Rich :¬)

[Matt1eD]

Xp loves RAM, try running it on a 600MHz P3 with 128 MHz SDRAM! Never had this problem with my preferrend MS OS - 2k.