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4G or 2G ram?

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krishcanag

krishcanag

Member
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Joined
Jan 12, 2008
Hello

A quick question, I see many people are running with 4G of RAM which I understand is useful for vista, if you are running XP home and even with the flight simulator running it says I have about 1G of ram free, is there any purpose or performance I can get by adding more RAM? I would think not.
 
If you're just running XP Home there's very little you would be doing that would benefit from more RAM. You've already got it right, check how much RAM is in use when you're doing the most intensive things you use your computer for (likely games, but could be things like video editting), if you don't see your RAM useage approaching 2gb then adding another 2gb won't help you.

If you ever switch to Vista you'll definitely want that other 2gb.
 
krishcanag said:
Hello

A quick question, I see many people are running with 4G of RAM which I understand is useful for vista, if you are running XP home and even with the flight simulator running it says I have about 1G of ram free, is there any purpose or performance I can get by adding more RAM? I would think not.
Click to expand...

It depends on your uses. in a 64 bit OS, the more the merrier imo. I'm using the max 8gb for my hardware and I like never going above 30% on the ram.
 
you wont see massive gains from 4G, things may feel smoother, but not likely.

i love my 8G as well :D

XP can see closer to 3.5 really, depends what parts you have in your rig.
 
MR-FIX-IT said:
XP can see 3 gig. Two 1gig sticks and two 512MB sticks. That's if you have four slots...
Click to expand...

XP will see 3.25 or so gb of Ram in the 32bit version. I forget what uses the 3/4 gb of ram, but it's a full 4gb of ram that is recognizes but only an actual 3.25gb that's usable.
 
max I see in use is when FS2004 is on and then I still have about 1G free, so I guess given I am on 32-bit XP, there is no point.
thanks
 
The benefits of 4GB with XP is much less than Vista. XP is lighter and inherently doesn't need as much memory. Vista on the other hand needs a minimum of 2GB and preferably 4GB. Vista also uses memory in a different fashion than XP which allows it to benefit a little more from "excessive" amounts of ram.
 
Vista on the other hand needs a minimum of 2GB and preferably 4GB.
Click to expand...
I thought this was true as well, until I was forced to dip down to one 2GB stick of DDR3 in single channel mode due to the other one failing. I was astonished at how smoothly my Vista x64 ran. I am now running with 2x1GB sticks of the same Gskill DDR3 in dual channel mode and cannot notice one speck of difference from having 4GB, even when alt-tabbing out of and into games. Perhaps this is because I am running highly overclocked DDR3, or perhaps it's because of my hardware specs, but I will not go back to 4GB unless something very unexpected happens.
 
^^^ lol wow you got some awesome hardware there, an excellent x48 board with a hard core quad core cpu with really nice HDD, with sweet GPU and some crazy PSU, i'm guessing by having rest of your hardware so high end, i don't think you would gain too much of a real world performance by using less ram, and this is in Vista. if you were running XP, that would be even less memory hog.
 
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