512mb RAM vs. 1024mb?

I see many people putting over a gig of memory in their systems now. Does it really benefit you to have the extra RAM? I thought anything more than 512mb was just a waste....can anyone clarify?

hmmmmm, interesting question.

i dont know much about this but im guessing most people would even use that much ram, even with the most demanding of games. The only time i would imagine using that much ram is video editing in which i do a lot of. (i think it uses a lot of ram) but even though, 512mb is enough for most video editors.....

Animators, graphics gurus i assume would also use a lot of ram.

I have a friend down the road who wants to swap 1gb of his 133mhz ram just for my 512mb of 166mhz ram because its quicker. I'd rather stay with 512mb of quick ram then 1gb of slower ram. It pays off more i think and you get more benefits because i'd never use that much ram.

512 will work for most plus the machine will run faster without the second stick. I do a lot of heavy numberical work so my !G does get worked hard.

If I were just starting out without any know heavy computing needs, I would just buy a good 512 stick and gain experience with it and my needs. You can always add another stick later if you determine you need it.

Enjoy.

And even if you you find out that you don't actually need all that RAM, you can create a RAMDrive out of it and have the best program loading times anybody has ever seen!

JigPu

yeah but ram drives take forever to initilize at bootup and you have place whatever data you had on the ramdrive again if you shut the computer down. RAM drives a cool thing but really not that practical IMHO. As far as your question 512 should be more than enough, anything over that is just really bragging rights, unless you are doing something on your computer that is pretty advanced then 1gb would help.

That's what i thought... the only use i could see is like the RAM drive you're talking about or AutoCad or some rendering program like that... maybe 3d studio Max. I'm just a gamer, so it really doesn't matter, but i will be Overclocking, so i will definately stick to the top quality stuff.

Nforce2 and NV30 come out already!

I'm getting into video editing, and I plan on getting at least 512 of really good ram. Hopefully a gig as soon as I can come up with the money. For gaming and general use however, 256 is pretty good. You can live with that.

With W98, there is supposedly a limit of 128 or 256 that you can have, and anything over that is wasted. OTH, I have used 512 with W98 and seen most of it used.

I use 512 on THIS machine (the dually) ATM, and there are some things that suck it down. I also have large caches for Cacheman. Civ3, UT, UT2 demo, Poser4, and some progs I use to manage my files (like finding dupes and HD copying) will also suck it down. I just ordered 2GB of Reg ECC RAM to see how much of that I can suck down.

2GB... That's bigger than my first few HD's put together! I'm sure many of you have graphics cards with more RAM than your first HD had. (Not me; the smallest drive I ever had was 340MB.)

256 is more than adequate for most home machines. 512 if you run a lot of apps simultaneously, or do some moderate graphics/video editing. More than that, you should be heavily into CAD or rendering........

I agree. 1 gig would be nice. But is'nt needed as of yet IMO. I've done a lot of video editing in the past and I only used 512 meg's of ram and it worked fine. Now I built another machine for my wife for school. So I had to take half of my memory out of this one for now and put it into her's. All my game's and everything still play pretty smooth. The system does get a bit sluggish after a while if I've got a lot of app's running at once. But it goes away.

well if you can say I got 1 GB of RAM that is some pretty sweet bragging rights

But seriously...why risk having to run into page filing that is a mere 100MB/s (therotically) or if you have 2 HDD RAID0 200MB/s(therotically) when you can RAM that does like 2000MB/s....you can see the speed peformance gain...

That why I got my 2 512MB sticks...every once and a while I will be over the 512MB in page filing yet I do not have to wait for my RAID 0 HDDs to load....I DON'T wait for my RAM...(to fast for me to tell)

If you got the money then go for it...who knows maybe in like 4 months you will reall want to have 1 GB of RAM....

Just a thought




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