3gb vs 4gb

bm23

bm23

Active Member
i have 2gb of ram right now and im thinking of upgrading. i would like to know how much faster would 3gb be than 2gb, considering the dual channel ram thing. also, is 4gb a waste of ram? i would be running vista home premium, which some says can support up to 4gb, while others say only 3gb. the ram is mostly for gaming since i dont do much memory intensive stuff.
 
You would see a decent performance gain with 3gb of ram. However, assuming you have a 2 x 1gb dual channel kit now, and you just throw another 1gb stick in there for 3gb you may actually see a performance loss without dual channel.

If you have a 32 bit version of Vista and you have 4gb of ram it may only use 3.3 or 3.5gb of ram. I have 32 bit vista home premium and in the system properties it sees 4.00gb of ram but it only uses 3581mb of it.

Either way you go, as long as you buy a dual channel kit 2 x 512mb or 2 x 1gb you will see a decent performance increase. I personally would recommend having 4gb though.
 
Yea might as well go for the 4gigs because RAM is so cheap. If you have 32-bit Vista I believe your system will only recognize 3.5 or so. If you wanna get use out of all 4, you need to upgrade to 64-bit Vista.
 
LTB said:
Yea might as well go for the 4gigs because RAM is so cheap. If you have 32-bit Vista I believe your system will only recognize 3.5 or so. If you wanna get use out of all 4, you need to upgrade to 64-bit Vista.
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No that's XP. Vista will see 4GB of RAM but it cannot utilize all of the 4GB because of the limitations from 32bit coding.
 
Intel_man said:
No that's XP. Vista will see 4GB of RAM but it cannot utilize all of the 4GB because of the limitations from 32bit coding.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the correction. So to clarify Vista 32-bit will see all 4GB but can't utilize all of it, while XP 32-bit will only see 3.5?
 
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i just tried switching the 2 RAM that i have to the 2 other available RAM slot. somehow, the computer didnt boot. and my MB is said to have 4 RAM slot... hmm
 
Intel_man said:
No that's XP. Vista will see 4GB of RAM but it cannot utilize all of the 4GB because of the limitations from 32bit coding.
Click to expand...

That is correct. XP does that not Vista.
I don't know about the capability of 32 bit and 64 bit of reading how much RAM it can read though.
 
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