2gig => 4gig?

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compnub2

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I was just browsing newegg and stumbled across the RAM I bought for ~$210 last December, its no on there for $55 after rebate (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220095)
I was wondering if I would see any difference with performance if I purchased another 2x1gig sticks, so 4x1gig sticks total. Or should I wait a while and buy either 4x1gig of a higher quality RAM, 2x2gig of higher quality RAM or just stick with what I have. $55 isn't much, so even if the performance gain was minimal I would consider doing it. I play WoW, CS:S and other HL2 games, WC3, Battlefield 2/2142 and looking forward to SC2, Huxley, and Warhammer. Any info on this would be appreciated thanks guys =)
 
Are you running XP or Vista? The gain when going to 4gb up from 2gb wouldn't anything more then seeing larger games and apps run a little smoother while seeing a loss of about 3/4gb due to the 3gb barrier in 32bit OSs.

Yet some have been running 4gb without problems on the 32bit editions of Vista Ultimate and Home Premuim. All Windows does is map out that amount of memory to hardwares making it unavailable for general use by games and apps.

HL2, EP1, Fear, Prey run quite well with 2gb of DDR2 800 memory installed while initially looking at 4gb for both XP and Vista 32bit and a possible 3rd OS namely XP Pro 64 or one of the Vista 64bit editions. With DDR3 now seen out the prices on 667mhz memory would drop and Patriot still isn't a bad brand while Corsiar xms series, Kingston Hyper X, OCZ, and a few others are usually the preferred.
 
most games will show a performance increase if you go from 2 to 4 gb of ram. if you have vista, you'll see more of an increase then if you have xp. mainly due to the fact that vista alone uses half a gig of ram.

half life and other first person shooters might not show much of an improvement since your only looking at stuff directly in front of you for the most part. but 3rd person games such as Oblivion will show a good improvement.

however, msot games can be made to take advantage of the extra ram if the proper mods exist for them. mods that do things such as: reducing LOD settings (so stuff doesn't get blurry until farther away, if at all), extending your viewing distance, replacing models/textures with higher detail ones, even increasing the buffer the game uses to preload map areas to reduce load times between map sections.
 
I was looking into a matched pair of 2gb dimms here for the new build since I run ATI driven cards for the image quality. Vista isn't as memory hungry as you have been lead to believe due it's new Super Prefetch feature that preloads the games and apps most commonly used in a form of standby mode. That sees them load faster then seen with XP and other versions of Windows.
 
I have 4gb of ram and i duel boot with xp pro and vista ultimate and when i right click my computer and select properties it shows 3.25 gb of ram on both os ,thats a pitty for me because i thought vista would recognize more, im thinking of going to vista ultimate 64 bit so all my ram gets used and of course for crysis.
 
With the 32bit versions of Windows 3/4 of a gig of memory is mapped out to hardwares. That's what makes that amount unavailable for your games and apps. Otherwise Windows would still utilize the 1.25gb for use with large apps and things like CAD. Vienna as it's be called may turn out to be the one 32bit version that sees some restructuring in order to correct some of that? Not so likely would be the probable answer.
 
Windows remaps that extra over the 3.25gb of memory addresses out to hardwares locking it up. That's the drawback of the 3gb barrier seen with 32bit Windows for the most part. The bigger drawback would be rushing into a 64bit edition for the primary OS since the support for 64bit is far behind and only now starting to see driver support plus the lack of 64bit games and apps.
 
How much address space that is reserved for other use depends on the config. 3.25 is the number for a specific hardware configuration, it could be higher, or it could be lower. And the missing 0.75GB ram is still completely lost

Server editions of windows don't have that limitation, they can go well above 4GB
 
Those don't see the linitations that the desktop editions see since they are network orientated. The average there is about 32gb in the Windows server 2003 edition. Don't forget your video card takes a piece right from the start. One good article on this mentions the following:

"If you install 4Gb, there is no way to make all of the RAM between 3Gb and 4Gb available without installing a 64-bit OS, which you can't do unless you have a 64-bit CPU. And even then it won't necessarily work." http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm
 
network orientated? what has that got to do with anything? My xp also does networking.

That article is not 100% accurate. Both linux and server windows can handle 4GB or more, if the hardware is in place
 
There's a big difference between a server orientated version and strictly network application and wouldn't be seen on the average desktop. As I mentioned the Server editions of Windows can support 32gb.

Linux is based on a totally different platform inclined to use virtual memory with some distros able to run on as little as 4mb of memory. It's still based on the old UNIX platform for the most part while more recent distros now see a need for a larger minimum amount. There are also 64bit distros availble there.
 
The problem is still the same. Server editions also use mmio, so does linux. But they're capable of addressing more than 4GB, and thus can take advantage 4GB ram with memory remapping enabled
 
That's memory mapped Input/Output for reference there. Linux uses demand paging to the drive instead of using physical memory. For most distros a separate swap partition is needed for that reason while the main files are found on the root.
 
I thought I could leave this open, but I'm going to put it to rest.

I don't know what a swap file has to do with the amount of addressable RAM. 32 bit XP/Vista/linux/whatever OS not using address extensions will have somewhere around 3GB of address space used for RAM. As tyttebøvs said, it depends on the hardware configuration, there is no set amount.
 
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