- Mar 28, 2005
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So I've been reading some of the posts regarding what to upgrade first -- CPU vs. RAM. Most of the time, I see RAM being the suggested path. So I did some testing on my system...
My system is a Conroe E6600 with 2 GB of RAM.
I launched several games (Ok, so they're some old titles like: Nascar Racing 2003, Rome Total War, Rise of Nations). But in each of them, only about 500MB of RAM was used (total of about 800MB when combined with system resources) , while 50% to 60% of BOTH processors was being used consistently by the games, with spikes even higher than that.
So am I not understanding how RAM works? If I increase my RAM from 2GB to 4GB, how would that improve system performance, especially since (even when gaming) the system isn't even using 1/2 of the RAM?
And even with 2 cores, the games were using over half of both of the processors' capacity. So it would seem to me that you'd want to increase the processor first -- especially with more complicated AI models being released today than the titles I tested.
Can someone enlighten me on this?
My system is a Conroe E6600 with 2 GB of RAM.
I launched several games (Ok, so they're some old titles like: Nascar Racing 2003, Rome Total War, Rise of Nations). But in each of them, only about 500MB of RAM was used (total of about 800MB when combined with system resources) , while 50% to 60% of BOTH processors was being used consistently by the games, with spikes even higher than that.
So am I not understanding how RAM works? If I increase my RAM from 2GB to 4GB, how would that improve system performance, especially since (even when gaming) the system isn't even using 1/2 of the RAM?
And even with 2 cores, the games were using over half of both of the processors' capacity. So it would seem to me that you'd want to increase the processor first -- especially with more complicated AI models being released today than the titles I tested.
Can someone enlighten me on this?