going to 4 gigs, questions

LaRZ · 25 Feb 2006 at 19:08

I'm using adobe illustrator and when my artboard gets big memory becomes an issue, even with two gigs of 3200 OCZ mem in dual chennel mode.

(my current OCZ el 3200 memory is running at 2.5-3-5-3 it took me few months to figure out that running it at 2-3-5-3 "which is what its advertised at" would cause HL2DM to lock up and fail in mem test.) is there much difference between 2.5 and 2 ? did I do the right thing ? right now its finally rock solid, but I want more memory.

If I add another two gigs(which is v cheap at the moment), will there be any performace related drawbacks. ? am I ok with windows xp pro?

all of this would be running of a DFI-SLI-DR board with plenty of juice from a seasonic s12.

thanks muchly for guidance and thoughts.

larz

ajgoodfellow · 25 Feb 2006 at 20:56

You would notice a slight drop in performance due to 2T timings and the way that XP Pro handles 4GB of ram - XP x64 edition would be a far more desirable choice with 4GB of memory

The difference between CAS2 and CAS2.5 isn't huge. The reason for this could be incompatibility with your motherboard or the fact that often the rated timings for certain memory sticks that are advertised as CAS2 are only CAS2.5 on AMD platforms

pinkaardvark · 26 Feb 2006 at 01:51

xp pro sp2 has a bug that means only 3 out of the 4 gb will be recognised in the OS.

Dunky · 26 Feb 2006 at 12:16

It's not a bug as such, it's a limitation of 32-bit memory addressing. 2^32 = 4GB of addressable space but in this space you need addresses for I/O, Video, BIOS and other devices. Hence WinXP may only see about 3.5GB (also certain chipsets have this limitation). As recommended above, if you are going for 4GB, I'd recommend XP x64.

The performance drop from 2T and slacker timings will probably be regained from the addtional speed from Illustrator so don't worry too much about timings but ideally get a similar set to your own just now.