512mb / 1gb difference

ok; it's time to SCHOOL THE NOOB everybody. i'm asking myself: "what kind of a difference will i see in 1gb ram as opposed to 512mb in playing new games""???

i assume the answer is "holy ****; HUGE difference!", but is that so??

uzibear said:

ok; it's time to SCHOOL THE NOOB everybody. i'm asking myself: "what kind of a difference will i see in 1gb ram as opposed to 512mb in playing new games""???

i assume the answer is "holy ****; HUGE difference!", but is that so??

Click to expand...

lol With 1GB you get faster load times and maybe a few jitters here and there but it recovers better than 512MB. With the 512MB you CAN really tell how sluggish it is before loading a game and after exiting. All in all grab a nice graphic card and game on

Also, I got much better performance when multi tasking with 1gb. I can run my mulie and a game at the same time for example.

I actually 'downgraded' from a 1024 megs of RAM to 512 megs of RAM a while back.

I did this because the Gig I had used fairly poor overclocking memory chips, so I sold it and bought myself a half gig of excellent overclocking BH-5 to replace it.

Long story short, after I switched to 512 Megs of RAM from a Gig, I noticed absolutely no degradation of in-game performance. Texture and map load times increased slightly, but my in-game FPS and smoothness was unaltered even with half the memory I had before. I was playing Doom 3, Farcry, and Warcraft 3 at the time (It is worth mentioning that I only game at 1024x768, but with as much eye candy enabled as my machine can handle). The difference was probably there, but so slight that I did not notice it.


My experience is purely anecdotal, but I'm not going to bother with a gig of memory with my new machine either - I still have that half gig of mint BH-5 and I intend to keep using it for awhile yet. A half gig of really fast memory with tight timings is enough for gaming in my experience, and much more fun to overclock.

In my opinion, the only reason for an overclocker to invest in a gig of RAM right now is to take advantage of Interleaving (depending on the platform you use).

I noticed a difference between 512mb and 1gig on UT2004; load times were slightly faster and fewer 'hitches'.
I am in the midst of building my clawhammer 3500 system, which is finished except for the RAM...my DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D didnt like the old crucial pc3200 i was trying to use so i have downgraded again to 512mb of OCZ performance series 2-3-3-6...and those longer load times are back at the beginning of the game and when exiting as was mentioned.
2x512 OCZ EL Platinum rev2 TCCD sticks are on the way.

*shrug* I've seen differences only in load times.

in game you might actually see reduced performance if you aren't running dual-channel, since generally speaking increasing the amount of memory referenced increases latency accessing it. the real reason to increase memory (and therefore increase latency/decrease overclockability [maybe, like in my case, 500MHz 512MB -> 450MHz 1GB same ram]) is to reduce the number of page faults your system produces while using applications that use a lot of memory (like games). try alt-tabbing with a gig and then without. you'll notice that it lags between with half a gig, and not nearly as much so with a full gig. this is because windows itself will hog up to 256MB or more with itself and whatever programs/drivers you have running to begin with. if you switch apps it will have to reload the other applications from the pagefile (hard disk, very slow) after saving the current contents of memory to the pagefile to begin with. if you then switch back to the game, it has to read all the game data that was swapped to the pagefile (sort of like a linux swapdisk) back into ram.

SO: long story short, more memory = less page faults. less page faults = better handling of multiple apps.

and as always, if anyone has corrections/clarifications or just a more eloquent way to put it, please do so

-Mitch

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if you aren't folding, or even if you are, ask me about F(OC)LD and how to join!
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very interesting. for my setup, is there any other 512mb stick i should consider in the same price range. i can get $40 for my kingston; anything i should consider in the $50-$60ish range?? only if it would make significant improvement. i'll be overclocking big time so i'd like to avoid my memory hampening me; though honestly i've yet to overclock and i'm unsure how memory relates to cpu overclock ability in performance. blah blah

Well, if you are gaming, there honestly aren't too many games that take advantage of it. Of course, this is probably going to start changing soon.

I noticed recently that even Tiger Woods Golf takes up 2 gigs of hard drive space.. Most of which is probably textures and terrain details... Even a game like this is bound to load a few hundred megs of this data into ram... So I can imagine the next generation fps games are going to really use a lot of memory in the future.

Right now, I believe Doom 3 and HL 2 bring ram usage over the 512 mark... but not by much. I think they just released a HL 2 DM map that requires you to have 1 GB of ram to load, so the time for 1 GB is coming.

I see a huge difference in performance for EQ2 between 1 gig and 512mb. I usually use 1 gig of plat rev 2 TCCD, works great. However when I got my Mushkin Blue 1 stick was bad so I only used 512mb. Even at 2-2-2-6 and 250Mhz, EQ2 was so choppy and crappy that I couldn't even handle playing it. I guess it depends on what game you are playing but I know for EQ2 you need a gig.

I saw a huge difference in WoW going from 512 to 1024mb, both set ups running in duel channel. My rig really bogged down in capital cities and raids until I upgraded.

Will things like lag in games when there's a LARGE amount of people around.. (Ironforge in World of Warcraft) improve with more memory? I've go a 512 stick of Corsair right now, a Radeon 9600xt running medium settings, and only 120 ping, but whenever I enter these HIGH population zones, the game lags like a fat kid in a relay.

Some of that lag is server load and Internet connection speed related but to answer your question, yes 1 gig will help reduce it.

512mb to 1gb is like playing far cry with no VSYNC then with VSYNC, definatly worth it when i was on 512mb far cry would stutter when turning fast with 1gb its smooth like a criminal

In a few words .....

You will have NO regrets adding another 512mb (1024mb = total ram) !

I don't know if all of this is true.. I've played some of these games on a 2 Ghz computer with 512 of RDRAM... and they were very playable (with the graphics turned all the way down - ****ty vid card). I guess it also depends on how much RAM you are using before you even launch the game.

Regardless, it would be silly not to have 1 GB of ram for any new computer meant for playing games... You don't want it obsolete next week, right?

Regardless, it would be silly not to have 1 GB of ram for any new computer meant for playing games... You don't want it obsolete next week, right?

Click to expand...

My view on this is that I already have a very good 2x256 meg set of overclocking memory that I may as well keep for my next machine.

When and if I ever need a full gig of memory, I will promptly sell my half gig of RAM and buy a gig, no sweat .

I do not however, see the point of wasting money on more RAM right now, when I know from my last machine build that I will be perfectly happy with what I already have. Obsolescence aside, I am more of an overclocker than a gamer anyways, and am quite satisfied with the performance and overclockability of my half gig of memory.

I notice a big difference between the two. Windows loads quicker. So do all of my applications. You wont regret getting another 512.

I didnt notice a huge difference between 512MB and 1GB. However it feels a little smoother when doing 34839483943 things at once.

i'm sold. suggestions? will i be hampering myself with 2x512mb vs. 1x1gb? the 2x512mb option is much cheaper, though i have no dual channel. i'll sell the kingston for $40, and i can afford 1gb in the $100ish range. thoughts? gskill? any 1gb sticks better price/performance?

would 2x512mb of the ocz for $120 be significantly better than the gskill for $100? that seems like something worthy to save for. perhaps i'll just use the 512mb i have for awhile; let the ocz go down in price a bit, and then upgrade later: that way i'll actually SEE the difference rather than just HOPE it's there. much better to notice something yourself than just hear others tell about it.