4GB with Athlon 64 ?

decto

decto

decto

Soldato
Joined
24 Jan 2006
Posts
2,624
Hi,

I'm looking to increase gaming performance from a smoothness perspective. Currently my system gets hammered by constant disk access which is a little annoying so I have a few questions for the experts.

Is there much benefit in switching to 2GB (2x1) from 1GB

Do Nforce 4 boards actually support 4GB, my MSI manual states that only 3GB plus and not the 4GB will be detected but doesn't actually give any more info.

With 4GB i'm sure I could turn off the windows page file, has anyone tried this with 2GB

Would 4GB of Geil value ram and no swapfile perform better from a smoothness perspective that 2GB of high performance memory.

I'm not after the maxium overclock or highest frame rates running a demo. I'm after best real world gaming performance.

Current system
Athlon 64 Venice 3200 @ 2.5Ghz 250x10 1.30v - runs cool at this <35C load on air HTT250 HTTmulti 4x DDR divider 333
2x512GB OCZ premier @ 416 Mhz (not good ram) 2T (no option to change)
MSI Neo4- f
POV 7800GTX 256MB
80GB 7200 2MB ATA-133
Samsung 19" LCD Syncmaster 913N
 
2gig is enough for all current games.

4gig will actually run slower than 2gig because you will have all 4 slots filled, meaning you have to run at 2T rather than 1T.

Furthermore from what I understand WinXP has trouble accessing a full 4gig of RAM for some reason, although this is hearsay.

Disabling the swap file is a bad idea, regardless of how much memory you have. The NT kernel is designed around having access to a swapfile and it is more than a simple 'overflow' for when you run out of physical memory.

Bottom line: Buy a 2gig kit and be happy :)
 
I agree with HangTime

Windows XP x32 has problems properly addressing the full 4GB of memory which leads to reduced performance, as does 2T timings. XP x64 removes this limitation

I'd go for 2GB
 
Just to clarify one of the above posts. 4GB limit is an issue with 32-bit addressing (2^32 = 4GB of addressable space) and since most OS operate with a flat memory model, certain memory addresses are used to reference gfx memory, BIOS, etc..Normal XP suffers from this however as stated above x64 gets around this since it can use 64-bit addressing (which can address 16TB of memory iirc). However 2T mode is a limitation of A64 memory controller when using 4 sticks of memory.

Even if you select 'No Page File' a page file will always be created, whether it be for a dump during a fatal error or just for preparing 'pages' for transferring to memory - Windows will always create one so it's best if you specify one (a fixed size swap file preferable to a variable size one which is what Windows will create).

Stick with a 2GB set which will be more than enough for all games just now.
 
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