The amount of ram in a computer?

[Shmee150]

I know until recently it's been advisable to have tightly timed 2x512MB Ram chips, but now BF2 means people are going for 2GB, but take what I have; 2gigs of Corsair PC3200C2PT, would adding another 2GB of exactly the same ram do anything different? I mean it's a rediculous idea, and more out of interest than actually considering it!

ShMeE

[philyau]

basically ur computer wont be swaping hdd disk space for paging , all will be done using the ram, therefore a lot lot lot faster at loading etc..


phil

[Shmee150]

So if you could afford it, then it's worth having 4 gigs or not? I confused!!

ShMeE

[joshwa]

re: 4gb - no, not currently, Windows 2000/XP doesn't support it properly anyway.

You can check how much memory you're using, by checking in Windows Task Manager...

[dangel]

2 gigs is good - i've been monitoring games and 1 gig isn't enough for some things like half life 2 (on 1 gig my free ram went down to 1mb!) which runs much smoother on 2gig systems. 4 gig huge overkill, major costs, major issues

[blinky]

BF2 does like a lot of RAM, but 1.5Gb+ is sufficient.

[Rohan]

You would need a 64-bit operating system like Windows XP x64 to utilise 4GB or more of memory. That's the main drawback of 32-bit computing I think, you are limited to less than 4gig of RAM because that's as much as can be addressed in 32-bit. At the moment 4gig is not necessary, but I would guess that it will be useful in a few months time.

[outlawzsm]

If you can afford it, go for it. You'll see shorter loading times in battlefield 2 but it is kinda overkill. Personally you should go for 1GB of low latency or high bandwith (DDR 500+)

[sawyen]

loading time wont kill anyone really.. an extra 10 sec of loading time wont really chew ur butt off.. I'd just be happy with 1GB..

[Shmee150]

So if money's no issue, ur better off with 4GB or 2GB? I mean this is of course purely out of interest, but surely 2gigs vs 4gigs of the same types of ram, then 4gigs would be better, but do what differently i'm not really sure!

ShMeE

[Chemical_Ali]

hi recently bought corsair 2048MB-3200C2PT.

i've got the old crucial value ram left on my book shelf (2x512mb) and was wondering if i should stick em back in and have 3gigs of memory,

will i see a massive difference or should i just flog them?

[dangel]

Can you still run in dual channel with uneven DIMM sizes?

[Shmee150]

I don't think dual channel works if they are uneven, but it might because technically so long as the two 1gig sticks and the two 512mb sticks are in their "dual" pairings, then it might work?

ShMeE

[blueball]

Check your motherboard specs carefully. For instance my Asus will support 4 Gigs of memory but you will only see 3 and a bit gigs. How they can call that support I don't know but they state it clearly enough in the manual and website. Its a chipset limitation in my case not a case of a poor Asus implementation.

[blueball]

I don't think dual channel works if they are uneven, but it might because technically so long as the two 1gig sticks and the two 512mb sticks are in their "dual" pairings, then it might work?

ShMeE

As long as your CAS (CL) timings are the same you should be OK. If you have a pair of 1Gb and pair of 512Mb then they should run in dual channell if all were CL3 or all were CL2.5

If you had a mixture of CL values then thats when you'll hit snags.

[mike_w]

As long as your CAS (CL) timings are the same you should be OK. If you have a pair of 1Gb and pair of 512Mb then they should run in dual channell if all were CL3 or all were CL2.5

If you had a mixture of CL values then thats when you'll hit snags.

In my experience, if you have RAM that runs at different CAS latencies, then it'll simply run at the slowest speed.