4GB for Vista?

Lonz

Lonz

Lonz

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I'm on Ultimate, play a lot of games, Battlefield and CSSource mainly. I have noticed the system seems to sort of cache 1GB of my current 2GB RAM when idle. I'm not too sure why but thats what happens and I get a lower FPS in games on Vista than on XP. Would it make sense to upgrade to upgrade to perhaps 3-4GB? Or is that a bit overkill? A lot of people seem to starting to get 4GB RAM now and was wondering whether it was worth it.
 
I think i am going to buy another 2gb in a month or so.. They look likely to come down some more. Which will be better!
 
Why do people complain that Vista is using their RAM? Would you rather pay £200 and have it sitting there picking its arse? Vista uses resources more efficiently than XP if you eliminate the bloatware e.g. useless gadgets that add to your boot time but info for which is available at the click of an "internet explorer" icon.

Anyway in answer to your question 4Gb will be great and see you right for a long time, but with DDR3 on the horizon 3b will do you until it comes out...imo.
 
Robbie G said:
Why do people complain that Vista is using their RAM? Would you rather pay £200 and have it sitting there picking its arse? Vista uses resources more efficiently than XP if you eliminate the bloatware e.g. useless gadgets that add to your boot time but info for which is available at the click of an "internet explorer" icon.

Anyway in answer to your question 4Gb will be great and see you right for a long time, but with DDR3 on the horizon 3b will do you until it comes out...imo.
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I don't see anyone in this thread moaning about Vista using their RAM? Anyway, even if we did it really wouldn't have answered the topic question.

How far away is this DDR3 horizon?
 
when you play a game that needs more ram, vista will stop using as much. The lower FPS is down to poor drivers for vista, nothing really to do with ram. So i would wait really.
 
I have 1gb of ram in Vista 64bit and that is always in the high 80's% so looking to upgrage to 2gb. Dont do any gaming at the moment and current ram at 533mhz. Any recomendations for (must be) cheap ram for boost.
 
Claire Drew said:
I have 1gb of ram in Vista 64bit and that is always in the high 80's% so looking to upgrage to 2gb. Dont do any gaming at the moment and current ram at 533mhz. Any recomendations for (must be) cheap ram for boost.
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My samsung ram ;)

It runs @ 533mhz @ 3-3-2-8 1T :cool:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17722720

It will go a lot higher. Just dialed in 814mhz and got it. :eek: Will definitly go higher.

Not bad stuff.

To bad we are not allowed to sell stuff in this forum
 
I'm running Vista x64 on 2GB at the moment (whilst the RMA of my other pair is processed :mad:) and the lowest I've ever seen the available physical memory go is ~700MB. I've seen a few screenshots of people claiming Superfetch to be using up everything but 4MB but haven't experienced that myself yet.

When I was running Vista on 4GB there was always like 2.5GB free :p and that was with all my workstation app's open... So IMO 4GB is probably a bit overkill at the moment but it won't be long until software starts sucking it up.
 
I haven't read all the thread, but with respect to games not running as smooth on Vista, it's got nothing to do with RAM. I ran Vista Ultimate x64 on 2Gb and at the beginning of each round in BF2 it took about 5mins to get the machine to stop tinkering with Superfetch. The constant HDD access was making the game chug. I put another set of DDR2 in for a total of 4Gb and this stopped that.

However, in terms of 'fps' performance, it's just down to the NO SWEARING drivers in Vista at the moment. Here's a back to back comparison of some games I did, note all settings maxed out on a 8800GTS with HDR on where applicable:

Vista 64bit XP 64bit
BF2 50-60fps 90-100fps
Stalker 15fps 50-60fps
Splinet Cell DA 30fps 50-60fps

Hope it gives you a feel. Needless to say I'm running XP again...

My 2ps worth.

Loko
 
Superfetch won't ever affect performance of foreground applications. Vista's kernel supports I/O prioritisation and Superfetch defaults to the lowest priority.
 
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NathanE said:
I'm running Vista x64 on 2GB at the moment (whilst the RMA of my other pair is processed :mad:) and the lowest I've ever seen the available physical memory go is ~700MB. I've seen a few screenshots of people claiming Superfetch to be using up everything but 4MB but haven't experienced that myself yet.

When I was running Vista on 4GB there was always like 2.5GB free :p and that was with all my workstation app's open... So IMO 4GB is probably a bit overkill at the moment but it won't be long until software starts sucking it up.
Click to expand...

Interesting, my work PC's got Vista X64 installed (2GB system ram), and even on a fresh clean install, it managed to get physical memory down to just 20 meg free after about 10 minutes.

Not that it matters, if I run Prime95, it grabs about 98% of the memory for itself, and Vista didnt seem to introduce any performance issues while releasing the memory. When Prime95 was finished with the ram, I did notice a brief slowdown, as Vista rushed to fill the memory again. But thats a pretty extreme example, as Prime95 wanted so much ram, vista was running with zero cache.

On my P4 computer, and 32bit vista, Superfetch, combined with Indexing brought the computer to a standstill for about 10-15 minutes after the PC was first booted up. Thats with an older 120GB hard drive.

On the other hand, Vist64, C2D E6420, and a slightly newerer 200Gig SATA hard drive, and neither superfetch, nor indexing really have any impact on the responsiveness at all.
 
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