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General discussion

1GB of Ram-vs-2 GB; Would I notice a difference?

May 17, 2005 4:41PM PDT

Sony Vaio Liquid Cooled
VGC-RA710 P4 Prescott 3.2Ghz Processor
Currently 1024 MB Ram
NVIDIA 256 MB G-FX 5200 AGP 8X
Would I notice a difference considering the cost.
I would have to remove all four 256 Bars to make room for 4 512 or 2 1024 Bars.
What would run faster?
Thanks,
Lakephillip

Discussion is locked

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My example.
May 17, 2005 9:18PM PDT

At the office we make these DVD training videos. We alter them from time to time so when the final is 'rendered' it is a benchmark to see how RAM affects some video editing and more test.

512M takes 6 hours.
1024M takes 5 hours 55 minutes.

This is across 2 identical machines down to hard disks, motherboards and more. We moved the 1G RAM to the other and the results were the same.

It's unlikely that many will get benefit from over 512M in most situations. Returns past 1G look slim except for bragging rights.

Bob

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Thanks for all your replys
May 20, 2005 4:22AM PDT

But......I have the NVIDIA GEForce FX 5200, because it is a silent card, no fan....the card that came with the computer was a geoforce fx 5200 128 mb card so I have doubled the video ram....but it works so well with this close to silent computer.
As for getting a new machine....I bought this 9/2004 for over $1800.00, so unless I inherit a large sum of money or win the lotto, I will have this computer for several more years.
As to what I do with it. I am not a heavy gamer. I mostly use the machine for e-mail, music, and watching dvd video.
Thanks again
Lakephillip

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If that's the primary use
May 20, 2005 2:52PM PDT

for this machine, then don't waste the cash on more RAM, you have more than enough.
2 gigs of RAM is really only justifiable in computers to be used for video or music editing or rendering animation.

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Cheaper upgrade with bang for buck payoff.
May 17, 2005 9:19PM PDT

That fx5200 is not a bad card, but move up to the 5700 or newer to feel the punch.

Bob

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RE:
May 18, 2005 12:23PM PDT

I agree...go with 1 GB of RAM and add a better video card

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RE:
May 18, 2005 2:46PM PDT

No, don't go with 1GB is you can help it. Just get 1x512 if possible and in the future, you want to upgrade get another 1x512 for a total of 2 to make 1GB. You really don't need it. ALso, a better graphics card would help. THe 5700LE is a great choice.
ROger

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FX series is terrible
May 21, 2005 7:49AM PDT

If you compare any radeon 9000 series card priced the same as an fx card you will see that the ati cards beat the nvidia cards. I'm surprised at how little cnet users know. The fx series cards were a big mistake, the pipline architechture is 4 x 2 pipe instead of the radeon's 8 x 1. Very few games these days use double texturing and therefore the fx cards run much like a 4 pipeline card.

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Here are some benchmarks.
May 21, 2005 8:00AM PDT
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More
May 21, 2005 8:02AM PDT
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Is 2 GB better than 1 GB
May 19, 2005 11:01PM PDT

Well that depends. In your case I believe it is the Front Side Bus that is slowing you up. The FSB controls the speed in which data is passed back and forth.

In one of my machines I have a 3.4 GHz CPU, an Intel Mother board that has a 800 FSB, 2 gig of DDR2 512 RAM and WDD SATA 10,000 RPM drives.

The increased memory will help the speed by keeping things in the faster than hard drive access. The FSB will pass information back and forth faster and the CPU is what processes any information.

The SATA drives in conjunction with the rest makes a very fast machine. The speed in your case is going to be the slowest part of the machine which is most likely the FSB.

One last point, XP programs will only be able to use 1 gig at a time. If you can run (or have to run) 2 programs (at one time) than it is possible to use more than one 1 gig.

Hyper threading of the P4 CPU's, makes it possible to run 2 instances at the same time. I would recommend looking to upgrade your machine.

Hope this helps.

Warm regards,

Gary

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What about on a G5 Mac?
May 20, 2005 12:16AM PDT

What's the point of diminishing return on a G5 Mac?

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GB vs GB
May 20, 2005 7:50AM PDT

I have about the same configuration as Gary, I find the biggest difference when using Adobe Photoshop CS and a lot of filters with multipul pxs open. On the other hand, just running XP pro with ZoneAlarm Security Suite, Ad-watch in the background and log on to the net on my HomePage, I'm using near 600MB of RAM. I have a second box that has nearly the same setup but only 1GB of RAM. When I start openning up a couple of different sites with pictures, the 1GB box starts hitting the hard drive. Both situations, Adode and the Web, my 2GB box is noticably quicker.

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I see a mistake in my answer.
May 20, 2005 10:57AM PDT

I should have said the slowest part of your machine is the hard drive. Soooo, if you didn't have enough memory you would see a real slow down with disk swapping.

Since you have enough memory then the CPU / FSB would play an important part in getting the job done. I bought SATA drives to minimize the slower read/write problems of a hard drive.

Be careful of getting DDR2 RAM. The cost back in December was $620.00 for 2 Gigs. There are a lot of conversations going on whether or not DDR ram is worth any speed you may get. I think it is in my application.

I would go out and get a new drive. Do your due diligence and get the fastest one available. If your motherboard will accept SATA, then I would seriously consider going that route. Remember you can always use the drive in the "new" machine when you get it.

Warm regards,

Gary

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Of course you can always switch to amd
May 21, 2005 7:55AM PDT

Amd and Intel have their ups and downs. Amd is extremely fast with floating point heavy operations and intel is great for video encoding and some light multi tasking. The highest bus speed for intel is 1066mhz, while the athlon 64 line of processors from amd have hyper transport(not related to hyper threading). Hyper transport is an extremely fast link between the componenets of the computer. Amd uses this to get rid of differenced between the fsb and the core clock. For example, the athlon 64 fx-55 (which is faster and cheaper than the P4EE) runs at 2.6GHz but because of hyper transport, the bus speed is also at 2.6 GHz, AMD also has an onboard memory controller embedded into the cpu, this kills the a lot of latency between the memory controller and the cpu and ram.

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PS
May 21, 2005 8:19AM PDT

P.S. Because the bus speed is so high, on a 2.6GHz machine you wont be bottlenecked by ram unless you stick in 7 sticks of ddr400.

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What are you doing with it?
May 20, 2005 12:50AM PDT

Use your system monitors to look at paging activity.
If there's no significant amount of paging, adding
more memory won't make a difference.

If you remove one of your 4 memory cards and your
workload doesn't slow down, adding more won't help.

If your old memory is slower than your memory bus and the
new memory is faster, that could help.

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Ditto
May 20, 2005 2:48PM PDT

Ditto. I run Norton System Doctor in the background because it allows me to keep an eye on how my system is running. One of the activities I watch is the percentage of page file usage. Most of the time it's below five percent, though I have seen it as high as twenty-three percent. Now I recognize that starting out with fifty plus threads running, then checking my e-mail, browsing a half-dozen or more web sites to compare this or that, playing music on the Windows Media Player, while holding one or two two-hundred page word documents open can task the speed of any system -- oh, I forgot scheduled anti-virus scans and network access to shared files (we spread out the audio-video to reduce the stress on any one system and to minimize any possible crash damage) -- but I still don't know what an acceptable percentage of page file usage is. Can you enlighten me? Other than that, I'm considering boosting my 1GB memory to 2GB, replacing my hard drive with two that have 16MB caches in a RAID-0 configuration, upping the LAN to 1Gb.

System:

Abit AG8 Motherboard
Intel 540 CPU
1GB DDR400 Ram Dual-Channel
Seagate SATA 250GB Hard Drive with 8MB cache
Ultra 500W Power Supply
Antec P160WF Case with lots of lights and fans

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Can have the oposite effect.
May 21, 2005 4:43AM PDT

More memory can affect the performance and slow the PC down. Also unless VM is set your hard drive space will be reduced as more VM will be allocated because of the extra RAM.
It is well known that having to much memory can slow rather than increase the speed of the PC and has been well covered in another thread.

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You'll not feel the differenc - 2GB might be even slower
May 21, 2005 5:24AM PDT

Not long time ago I had achance to check a computer with 3.0 procesor with Hyper Trading motherboard (Intel 865GLC) that 2GB memory (DDR 400). I was suprised to find that not only that it was not faster then a 512MB memory (DDR 400), but it looked like that it was even slower. I think that windowes XP can't manage a large amount of memory.

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What type of Ram? SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, or RDRAM
Jun 4, 2005 2:25AM PDT

keeping it simple, 1 Gig of Ram should be more than enough for the average user, but RDRAM far out performs DDR SDRAM which is better than SDRAM. RDRAM is more costly but as in most things in life, you get what you pay for