Originally posted by: malak
Does more RAM help? I thought it was mostly CPU power.
If you don't have enough already, more can definitely help...
With 512MB of RAM, I wouldn't advise running with the Large WUs (>5MB) and -advmethods switch, because F@H will use too much RAM (as much as 200MB in my experience) and everything else will run slower due to excessive swapping. If you were to upgrade to 1GB, you could enable those options and open the possibility of getting the larger WUs with double the points for the same amount of work (in other words, more points per day for your score - always a good thing!).
If you have a hyperthreaded system or dual CPU system and need to run two clients, then I'd say for certain that you shouldn't enable the large WUs unless you have at least 1GB of RAM. Even then, if you do lots of memory-intensive programs (e.g. Photoshop, VMWare), you may be better off not choosing large WUs, because that may mean 400MB or more combined between the two F@H clients.
But in general, if you have enough RAM to do what you want to do 99% of the time without excessive swapping, then you'll get more benefit from upgrading your CPU than you will from upgrading your RAM. BTW, right now I think the sweet spot for "workstations" is 1GB (mainly because I just upgraded from half that amount, and things are much smoother now).