New 6800 GT Owner! Question about Ram:

Hello All:
I have a quick question I am hoping someone can help me with. I recently purchased a 6800 GT video card in preparation for Doom 3 (and future games). Currently, I have the following setup:

Epox 8RDA+ Motherboard
Athlon +2100 cpu (clocked at approximately 2.2ghz)
512mb Corsair PC3500 XMS BH-5 Ram

Now my question is, am I going to have to add more ram to run doom 3 smoothly? Will I need 1 gig of ram? Since I cannot find another stick to match my current ram, I pretty much need to buy two whole new sticks. Please share your opinions, I am all ears!

I think more ram would be great and a new processor wouldnt be bad because that card will be very limited by that cpu.
TheNewGuy

Ugh I dont like the sound of that.......hehe. How exactly is my card going to be limited by my cpu?? 2.2ghz isnt good anymore? Should I get one of those athlon mobile cpu's? Any ram recommendations (additionally, I am correct when I say I am going to have to ditch my current ram because it wont run with any other types, right?).

Baptizer said:

Ugh I dont like the sound of that.......hehe. How exactly is my card going to be limited by my cpu?? 2.2ghz isnt good anymore? Should I get one of those athlon mobile cpu's? Any ram recommendations (additionally, I am correct when I say I am going to have to ditch my current ram because it wont run with any other types, right?).

Click to expand...

you might have better results with "matched" ram, yet you should be fine getting almost any type of memory, and adding it in.

since they wont be matched sticks, you might have to play around with your timmings and vdimm to make things best for you.

wait one more day or two, and [H] will have a bunch of rigs tested with Doom3...then you'll know if you truly need a better CPU or not.

I will say, that more system ram will help you alot now in Doom3.

I hope this helps.

mica

Thanks, micamica. If I do need more ram, I'll probably pick up a stick of corsair xms pc3200 512mb.

In terms of upgrading my processor (if i need to upgrade my processor), exactly what should I be looking at? One of those mobile athlons that overclock really high?

man, people need to stop confusing far cry with Doom 3. Doom 3 is NOT CPU limited, its GPU limited. actually, its 60FPS in-game limited. hardocp will be putting out their Doom 3 Hardware guide soon, i believe people will be suprised how well d3 runs on slower proccessors, not that 2.2GHZ XP is slow.

definatly pick up another 512mb, pretty much all newer game will use more than 512mb and your computer having to use a swap file really kills perfomance, also from benchmarks people have been doing it takes a current CPU (athlon64/P4 3.0+) to not bottleneck the 6800/x800 cards, while the GPU is a big part of the perfomance the CPU will still limit games a lot even with a good graphics card.