How much ram?

[imported_ecca]

I want to upgrade from 1 gig ram to 4 gig ram, & mobo to msi k8n diamond +. I use system only for gaming. OS is Win XP home ed. My question is whether the system will recognise & be able to use all the 4 gig ram? If not how do u get the system to do so?

Amd 64 3000 cpu
9800pro vid card

 

[Geomagick]

What is the reason for going to 4GB. There is almost nothing to be gained by going above 2GB in Win XP.

To use the full 4GB effectively you will need a 64bit operating system, and programs written to take advantage of the 64bit environment.

 

[imported_ecca]

I want to do system upgrade for gaming only & thought the more ram the better

 

[Bobthelost]

Well i'm afraid you're wrong. If you use 4 sticks of RAM then the RAM speed is decreased slightly. It's not a major difference but it does mean that 4GB of RAM is slower than 2GB.

 

[ripn]

I upgraded to 2 Gigs and could not see the need to go to 4.

I would say goto 2 and save the $$ for some other goodies.

 

[HardWarrior]

Originally posted by: ecca
I want to do system upgrade for gaming only & thought the more ram the better

Perhaps 4gig, and the hardware capable of using it effectively, will be an issue with Vista games. Right now, though, the money you'd spend on an extra 2gig may be better spent on something else, or saved, IMO.

 

[Mavrick007]

Upgrade your 9800Pro card to something better with the money you would save by getting 2Gigs instead of 4Gigs of ram. The video card is going to be much more important here than ram.

 

[acole1]

Originally posted by: George Powell
What is the reason for going to 4GB. There is almost nothing to be gained by going above 2GB in Win XP.

To use the full 4GB effectively you will need a 64bit operating system, and programs written to take advantage of the 64bit environment.

* Windows 95: 1GB

* Windows 98: 1GB

* Windows 98SE: 1GB

* Windows ME: 1.5GB

* Windows NT: 4GB

* Windows 2000 Professional: 4GB

* Windows 2000 Server: 4GB

* Windows 2000 Advanced Server: 8GB with PAE enabled

* Windows 2000 Datacenter Server: 32GB with PAE enabled

* Windows XP Home: 4GB

* Windows XP Professional: 4GB

* Windows Server 2003: 4GB

* Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition: 32GB

* Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition: 64GB


Who spreads this crap about XP only supporting 2GB of ram, not 4?!

And yes, 2GB is the best way to go for you.

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: acole1
Who spreads this crap about XP only supporting 2GB of ram, not 4?!

And yes, 2GB is the best way to go for you.

Well, it can only support a useful virtual memory space of 2GB per process since it maps the upper 2GB of the 4GB memory space to operating system functions. Of course, you can up the limit to 3GB with a simple setting in boot.ini. Also, if running a lot or processes or extremely big processes you can effectively use more than 2GB. If you also benefit from a lot of disk cache, you can effectively use more than 2gb.

Also, video card memory mapping cuts into some of the 4GB on on a system. If you have a 512MB card, the memory mapping would render 1GB of your system mem useless :Q

 

[acole1]

Right on!
:thumbsup:

 

[imported_ecca]

Thx all for ur input