Worthy upgrade?

[kookooshortman55]

Right now I have 3GB of PC-5300 RAM, 5-5-5-15.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134216

I'm looking to upgrade to 4GB of PC-6400 RAM, 4-4-4-15.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227139

In a dual channel mobo, with 32-bit Vista, am I looking at that much of a performance increase? I'm looking at buying 2 of the sets in the second link. On sale for $20, might have a friend buy the other one for me. And considering I bought 1GB of 5300 for $30 at the office store, I could sell 3GB for at least $40 and get my money's worth?

Money aside, would this upgrade be worth the effort? I will probably only be able to use the extra 250MB, but the RAM is faster.

 

[cohen]

with 32 bit vista.... no... not worth it...

 

[kookooshortman55]

What about the increased speed? Also the dual channel so I would get double the bandwidth?

 

[cohen]

You won't notice any difference in performance or anything.

1. - The speed is not much higher
2. - Lactency is lower...

 

[kookooshortman55]

What about dual channel? And lower latency and higher speeds certainly are good right? Depending on how much I can sell my current memory for, this is pretty cheap. I might get 1GB of the 5300 for $30. If the increase in speed and decrease in latency means nothing, I know the memory works faster in dual channel, might as well get 4 GB of something.

 

[TrainTrackHack]

Yes, lower latency is better. The increased speed, lower latency and dual-channel would more than double the throughput. For PC2-5300 latencies 5-5-5-15 seem a little high, IMO, but as I think I've said before buying one 1GB stick would probably be better. I read an article on Tom's hardware that compared DDR2-800 in single- and dual-channel, and running the memory in dual channel only improved the performance by a few FPS, showing that not nearly all memory bandwidth is being even utilized. I don't know if lower timings, dual-channel AND lower latencies even together would result in any noticeable performance increase as memory is rarely the bottleneck. If you do some really memory-intensive stuff and I'm not talking about "normal" games but something like crysis, or heavy multimedia/video/graphics editing or file compression, go for it, but if you're more into medium-weight games, buying an 1GB stick and therefore having your memory in dual-channel would improve the performance enough, assuming that the RAM speed is being a bottleneck in the first place.

The 4GB kit is a lot better value than a 1GB stick, though.

 

[kookooshortman55]

Yeah, well before I was asking if I should add more RAM. As of now I'm either getting 4GB of 5300 at 5-5-5-15 or 4GB of 6400 at 4-4-4-15. I took your advice on the dual channel and I realized I want 4GB. Thanks for the advice, any other opinions? I think I might just go for the 1GB 5300 add on. Speak now or my RAM will forever suck, haha. I'm going to have to place my order in like an hour!

 

[vix]

Quite frankly, I don't think that replacing your 3 GB of PC5300 with 4 GB of PC6400 is worth the price. You really won't see any difference in performance, especially if you're running at stock.

How is you RAM currently setup? Two 1 GB sticks and two 512 MB sticks? Three 1 GB sticks? If anything, upgrade the existing odd 1 GB to two 1 GB sticks (for a total 4 GB) and you should be good.

 

[fade2green514]

not worth it. 100% not worth it.

if you had quad core, maybe. but even then you wouldnt have slow ram if you dished out the money for quad core.

btw, ram speed really only increases performance a small amount, unless it bottlenecks your processor.. then you've got a problem. dual core doesnt get bottlenecked.

 

[kookooshortman55]

Okay well after looking all over the internet I found a memory benchmark test. FPS in games increased 0.5 fps with the 6400 and I don't think that's worth $70. Right now I have 3 1GB sticks, but since I have 32-bit Vista I can only have a max of 4 so it's okay. I think I might just get the last GB, it's on NewEgg for $20, plus an amazing $7 S&H haha. According to the Vista performance rating my CPU is my bottleneck by quite a bit, but I'm sure that program means nothing.

 

[fade2green514]

yea getting the extra stick would make it run dual channel which doesnt quite double bandwidth, but it increases it by quite a bit so thats a good upgrade. then again, if you bought the other ram then you have some parts to sell or to put into another computer so its really your choice...

ive been gradually upgrading my computer over the year and a half that i've had it and right now i have an extra motherboard (with integrated graphics), 2 extra gb of ram, and ive got a bunch of hard drives laying around. all i REALLY need to create a decent file server (and a computer to let sit and process apps that would make my games lag) is about $150 worth of parts and i have a new computer.

 

[kookooshortman55]

Haha well this is my one and only computer. I've basically taken a stock computer and upgraded everything except the mobo, processor, and HDD. Once I add the extra GB of RAM and then an 8800GT I think I'll finally be happy with this. I'm thinking maybe in 2 years when I actually have money I'll fully customize my own computer and sell this whole thing.