2gb uograde worth it?

times_champion

times_champion

times_champion

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Joined
30 Oct 2004
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364
I hava PC with the following spec;
3.2ghz dual core (940) pentium
7800GTX 256mb
1gb DDR2 RAM
320gb SATA HDD

It plays games great, but games such as NFS:MW, Tomb Raider: Legend and Quake 4 (in ultra mode) can be jerky at times. I know these games recommend a 512mb graphics card, but I dont want to upgrade my card so soon (I only got my PC in feb) and will probably get a 512mb DX10 card when theyre available. If I get a RAM upgrade to 2gb will that help with the jerkiness at max settings? What kind of RAM should I get? I know it is supposed to be easy installing RAM but as the only PC maintanence I have ever done before is replacing a DVD drive, do you think it is going to be easy enough, or would you take it to a shop to be on the safe side?
 
What you need to do is run one of the games that are jerky, then when you've finished a bit of a session, exit to windows, press CTL+ALT+DEL and go to the Performance tab, in the commit charge section there is a value called peak, you need to see if that is over 1,000,000K if it is then you are filling your gig of RAM and are then paging to disk, and a RAM upgrade will benefit you :)
 
Tomb raider legend gave me a peak of around 700000 so I guess that does need a 512mb card for any increase. Quake 4 in ultra mode gave me a peak of 2097224 though! So 2gb wouldnt even be enough! Would having 2gb let me play ultra mode more or less smoothly then?
 
yeah you should grab 2GB, don't worry about upgrading your GTX yet. You get much larger performance hits when you run out of system memory than when you run out of video memory. When you run out of vid memory you should incurr small performance hits, when you run out of system memory you enter a world of stuttering mess!
 
The performance monitor on my G15 keyboard is regularly showing my RAM as more than 60% full when gaming, so I'm glad I got 2Gb and not 1 :D
 
Cyanide said:
The performance monitor on my G15 keyboard is regularly showing my RAM as more than 60% full when gaming, so I'm glad I got 2Gb and not 1 :D
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Yeah especially with a high performance setup like your SLI 7800GTs, there's no point in holding it back with paging.
 
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