how much is enough?

i got my p4 2.26 running at 2.65 4x mem w/ turbo on my asus p4t533 but i only have 256mb of ram. I notice sometimes when I go in and out of games system seems to hang a little or when I exit out of a game it takes awhile for my desktop to reappear. I know on my old pc p3 800 w 512mb ram everything ran smooth. so I'm guessing its the need for ram, but seeing as how rdram is so expensive.. another 256 will cost me a 100 or 512 will be 250.. so is 512 total enuff for a p4 rdram based system? or would i require more and should I get the 512 stick? I've heard the p4's are memory hungry but... hmm can someone fill me in here.

thanks

the type of x86 cpu has nothing to do with memory usage. P4/P3/P2/P1/K6/K6-2/K6-3/K7 none of them are going to make a difference for memory consumption. What you do on your system is likely not the same as what you did on older systems. If you simply brought the hdd of the new system into the older one it would likely not handle it as well as it was handling what it used to run. Few people need more than 512MB of ram. But the performance of a system is most heavily dependent on the OS and how it deals with memory management both with ram and swap. Also, setting too aggressive settings can slow things down quite a bit in a system. Best to work from default safe settings and see if anything actually speeds up as you get more aggressive.

Unless you're using memory intensive apps, 256 meg should be ok for most things. Obviously 512 meg would be better and nice if you can afford it.

Most newer 3D games just seem to take a long time to open and close down nowadays for some reason. I don't really think it's a RAM issue.

512M is a nice sweet spot for Windows. Anything more is a waste unless your doing heavy PhotoShop work.

safemode said:

the type of x86 cpu has nothing to do with memory usage. P4/P3/P2/P1/K6/K6-2/K6-3/K7 none of them are going to make a difference for memory consumption. What you do on your system is likely not the same as what you did on older systems. If you simply brought the hdd of the new system into the older one it would likely not handle it as well as it was handling what it used to run. Few people need more than 512MB of ram. But the performance of a system is most heavily dependent on the OS and how it deals with memory management both with ram and swap. Also, setting too aggressive settings can slow things down quite a bit in a system. Best to work from default safe settings and see if anything actually speeds up as you get more aggressive.

Click to expand...

WHAT?!?!? not even close a P1 is not going to be able to use the same memory bandwidth as a P4 and to say that its all the same is way off base. Today’s chips work in GBps as opposed to MBps or even bps (like on 8086 cpu's) I will look for the totals for 2 chips you mentioned and post it to show a comparison

Here is a link to show some CPU memory bandwidth on different CPU’s http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/peecee/Bandwidth.html
look a the 6th one down its a “386” then pick any other one there is a BIG difference

stedeman: the question at hand has nothing to do with bandwidth. It was ram usage. As in taking up space in ram. Nothing to do with how fast it uses the ram. The usage does not change depending on the cpu. your point about bandwidth has nothing to do with the topic.

I was not referring to the topic only your response to it.
My response was to show that a newer CPU has a higher “potential” for the use of more RAM than older CPU’s. I was only using bandwidth to show this.

the cpu has nothing to do with how much memory is in use in a system period. Newer cpus can take advantage of ram bandwidth and frequency but the use has to do with the software running on the computer. Not the cpu you happen to be using. That was my response. The ram has no way of knowing what cpu is being run on a system, it talks only to the motherboard controller, the cpu has no idea what kind of ram is being used in the system, it only talks to the motherboard. The motherboard ultimately determines how well the ram is used and what kind of ram is used and what kind of cpu is used and how well that cpu is connected with the ram. The cpu and ram dont know about eachother directly. You're confusing the word "use". The context of the thread is a quantitative use, referring to thow much of the capacity of storage in ram is in active use.

Well actually since the P4 would send more info, at a faster speed, to the ram than a P3, I would think you would need more ram.

stick a hdd on a different controller card starting at a non-dma capable one and moving up to the latest. Does it somehow become full now that you are on a faster controller card? No. They are completely unrelated. If i load up a program on a 486 computer it's going to take up the same amount of memory (assuming the same OS is running on both and the systems have the same amount of ram) as a P4 or athlon tbred system. If i move my hdd from a 486 to a P4 system i'm not gonna need any more memory than i had on the 486. People have the tendency to run more programs on faster systems and that gives the impression that faster systems need more memory. This obviously isn't the case however. the speed of the system or the bandwidth in which the system has does not dictate the efficiency of storage on the memory, that's only effected by the OS.

omniskillz said:

i got my p4 2.26 running at 2.65 4x mem w/ turbo on my asus p4t533 but i only have 256mb of ram. I notice sometimes when I go in and out of games system seems to hang a little or when I exit out of a game it takes awhile for my desktop to reappear. I know on my old pc p3 800 w 512mb ram everything ran smooth. so I'm guessing its the need for ram, but seeing as how rdram is so expensive.. another 256 will cost me a 100 or 512 will be 250.. so is 512 total enuff for a p4 rdram based system? or would i require more and should I get the 512 stick? I've heard the p4's are memory hungry but... hmm can someone fill me in here.

thanks

Click to expand...

It's probably "hanging" becuase it's using the swapfile, which is slower, instead of physical memory so you notice some lag. Your problem is that you don't have enough megabytes of memory because its already loaded with the application. Just add what you can afford.

No a P4 is not eating up your ram in the way you think it is. It likes bandwidth but it's also not squating on the capacity.