I currently have 768MB of pc3200 ram on my DFI motherboard. The motherboard has three ram slots in which i have a 512 and a 256 ram module. I'm planning to upgrade becuase I run a lot of programs and sometimes my systems slows down becuase of lack of memory. I was thinking of buying a stick of 1gb of ram to make 1.75gb total. Is that over kill or should I buy a 512 stick instead? I'm also thinking about bf2 and other future games that might benefit from the extra ram. Thanks for the reply!
Hrmmmm I'm inclined to say yes and no to no more than 1GB. The amount of people on the forums I've seen over the time I've been here are like "Na, you'll won't need 1GB of RAM for ages in games" Not long after, 1GB is virtually the standard now. It won't be long before your going to use over that. Now it's up to you whether you are going to keep the computer long enough before that happens, or upgrade again when it happens. What is it, BF2 alone uses 800MB odd of memory ? Won't be long till it's up there.
Huge RAM Altrough decent RAM can be had cheap enough to upgrade it anyway, I haven't seen any single game or app using more than 512MB. Could you post a screenshot of the task manager showing that BF2.exe does use more than 512MB.
Re: Huge RAM LOL, He's right you know...BF2 was using about 470MB of ram on my computer with settings on Medium. Now imagine on High .
Yeah, everything was on high for that Task Mngr shot, but it was only Demo. Not as big a map as full inst., no planes, etc.
I saw it on the forums here somewhere, can't find where it is though It was using like 820MB or 840MB or something crazy. Whether that was a memory leak and the end of a big gaming session I can't remember, but it was somewhere. I would still recommend no more than 1GB of RAM, and it won't be long before Games are needing more.
Unless of couse you are an artist and constantly switch between 3dsmax, photoshop, etc at the same time.
Artists Most artists specialize on one package, but doing other things while encoding a movie is not unthinkable, atrough this requires at least a HT capable CPU to work. Besides, my Pinnacle encoding package uses 128MB chunks, meaning that it will not go over 256MB at any time.
It worked fine with 1gb of ram without VIRTUAL MEMORY but didnt worked when i had only 512mb and no Virtual memory. When i activated Virtual memory again with only 512mb it worked. So it takes 300mb+ ? "windows takes some from 512" I think its near 500mb.
Virtual memory Virtual memory is designed to hold parts of Windows and other running applications that are not active, so you can hardly call any use of VM a lack of RAM. However, if a lot of swapping would occur, that would indicate a lack of RAM. Also, Windows only uses about 128MB for itself, but AV software and various "tray tools" can boost this somewhat. Spyware can also boost the memory usage, but that should be solved with a scanner like Ad-Aware. Besides, my PC currently uses just 252MB total memory with various Office programs and websites open, according to the task manager.
