is 1Gb of ram a good bare minimum?

Cyber-Mav said:
4 gig is cheapo, cost me only £85 for 2 gig from crucial all in.
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Cyber-Mav, how in buggery have you got your cpu at 2900mhz with 4gigs of ram installed ?

your system:

__________________
Opteron 146@ 290 x 10 @1.375v 2.10bios
Asrock DualSata2, Crucial 4gig 400mhz, (1gig x 4)
Inno3d 7600GT 630/837
Seagate SATA 250gig, Enermax 550w

I thought running 4 sticks of ram with AMD's arcutecture was out of the question for such high speeds, if you have managed it, amazing work !
 
Combat squirrel said:
I thought running 4 sticks of ram with AMD's arcutecture was out of the question for such high speeds, if you have managed it, amazing work !
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AMD64 isn't hugely limited when running 4 modules really, especially the E revision cores.
 
runs fine at that overclock even when i had 2 sticks of ram. i could never manage to get 1T command rate working even with 2 sticks of ram with this board so i though if im gonna be limited to 2T command rate i may as well do it with style and get 4 gigs of ram on the case.

a special offer came through on crucials website and i thought i may as well go for it.

have not regretted it since.
 
wish i had a better board that could go over 290htt without problems. guess im stuck with a measly 2.9ghz. atleast its at below stock volts so the cpu runs really cool even in this hot weather thanks to my BIG TYPHOON.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
the way i see it:

256mb: good enough to run word
512mb: good enough to run winamp and word at the same time
1gb: good enough to run basic games like tombraider 1, doom 2, films, half life 1.
2gb: good enough to run battle field 2, doom3, quake 4, tomb raider legend.
4gb: good enough to run oblivion, lots of photoshop work, video rendering, etc.

:D :D :D
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4gig (as 4 sticks) slows your command rate to 2t, hence is no good for enthusiasts, as it makes your system much slower. IF you have to have it for specialist use, fair enough though.

Its like these people who put a 5 inch fart cannon on their crappy old Nova and tell you it goes faster because of it. :p
 
Jay_t said:
4gig (as 4 sticks) slows your command rate to 2t, hence is no good for enthusiasts, as it makes your system much slower. IF you have to have it for specialist use, fair enough though.

Its like these people who put a 5 inch fart cannon on their crappy old Nova and tell you it goes faster because of it. :p
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5% max I think tests showed, but for the average user, 2Gb is MORE than enough.

TBH anyone who think games will benefit with more then 2gb should be shot because its a waste, by the time games use 2Gb+ then DDR will be phased out - which effectivly life it is being now..

CR.
 
pinkaardvark said:
What are folks using 4 gb for? Win XP Service pack2 only addresses 3gb max.
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Proof (please)? Really, because I thought of something like that. I know some older motherboards have issues seeing over 3GB RAM :confused:
 
Cyber-Mav said:
the way i see it:

256mb: good enough to run word
512mb: good enough to run winamp and word at the same time
1gb: good enough to run basic games like tombraider 1, doom 2, films, half life 1.
2gb: good enough to run battle field 2, doom3, quake 4, tomb raider legend.
4gb: good enough to run oblivion, lots of photoshop work, video rendering, etc.

:D :D :D
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1GB RAM for HL1, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA :D
 
yes 1Gb should be the bare minimum and is basically entry level memory these days.

1Gb will be fine for pretty much everything short of heavy video/audio editing etc. Some games might chug along but will still be playable.

I just went from 1Gb to 2Gb and do notice an improvement. My normal apps are a bit quicker , but games see the biggest improvement. Battlefield 2 and World of Warcraft really appreciate more memory!!!
 
my laptop does perfectly well with 512mb thanks very much :) its only ever used for office apps/browsing so its never sretched. Depends what you're planning on doing with the pc.

I do ponder why i bother have 2gb on the desktop.. I guess I'm just a sheep but I won't be joinging Mavs flock anytime soon..

Seems like 4gb for pimping 4gbs sake ;)
 
Toryglen-boy said:
is 1Gb of ram a good bare minimum?
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Its a good bare minimum yes because it can be had so cheap these days, but for basic office apps/programs/internet browsing, there is NO noticeable difference between 512MB and 1GB in Win XP.

I hardly play any games on my PC these days and I can't tell iv got 2GB of ram in there, everything runs exactly the same as when I had 1GB, or even 512MB to be honest. Those who think windows starts running 'smoother' are having a laugh ;)
 
Who says you can't play doom3/hl2 etc on 512mb of ram :p

Works fine for me, only complaint is it takes a while for loading... Should really grab some 1gb stuff tbh, but on 1440x900, HQ, and some AA/AF, framerate really isn't too bad. Does suffer with mutiple apps open though.
 
I think I disagree with the some of the points made in the thread. While 2 GB is becoming the norm for games, 1 GB is fine for many games and I don't mean Doom 2 and Tomb Raider who ever mentioned that. Its true some games are memory hogs *cough* World of Warcraft*cough* but others such as those on the source engine and Doom 3 run fine with 1GB and 2 GB is just an extravagence. So if the person has a 6600 GT and a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz or AMD eqivalent there is little point in my opinion going for 2 GB. However if the person has a more modern setup 2 GB my have more of a benefit.
And calling 1 GB the "bare minumum" is like saying a 6600 GT should be the bare minimum graphics card. The fact is most people don't play games and just use Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word. When I had 256 Mb of RAM back in the day Windows XP ran fine. I have a habit of keeping track of how many applications I have running. I never have more than 5 windows open at any one time.

RAM really from my expierece just improves loading times and helps a little in the fps department when on big outdoor levels such as Battlefield 2. But once you have enough RAM you have enough. Its not like a Graphics card where you will see an improvement every time you stick in a better graphics card. You could have 20 GB of RAM as still not notice a thing. Everyone that their max RAM used at any one time. For some people this may be 1GB others my be 1.5 GB and of course 2 GB.
 
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well, so far, i've got a few cacheman tweaks set up so preferably games and apps try not to use pagefile but use all available mem(windows is still pretty useless at doing that.

but the prey demo uses, at 1600x1200 full quality settings a quite frankly astonishing 200mb memory, about 500 megs of page file but its not at all choppy, it seems to get use more memory during loading levels, i think thats all the page file is there for to decrease loading times. tbh its small indoor area's so far and it loads quite frequently but not so often its irritating at all. but for bf2 which isn't exactly new 2gigs is really really useful. as we get more and more memory in base systems, and with dell pretty much always offering free upgrade from 512 to 1gb mem deals game makers will be able to make games that load less, or have bigger and bigger maps which for multiplayer games will be very useful. for instance, when everyone has 2 gigs as standard and connections are faster, imagine a game of CS with 100 players on a huge huge map. memory is good, tell all your friends that don't know about computers they have to buy one with 2gigs in, sooner we all have it sooner this can all happen
 
Personally I think 512meg is the bare minimum. I've recently put together a second rig from odds and ends (2.7ghz cpu paired with a voodoo3 pci, yummy!) and stuck 512meg in that. With 512meg you can run most apps and all but the most demanding games, albeit with a bit of paging.

1gig is a good starting place for gamers. Fancy modern games are typically peaking at over 768meg RAM usage and this allows you to run most games reasonably smoothly if you turn down the textures a bit. Personally I'm still running a 1gig kit I bought in 2003, mainly because it runs at 231mhz cas2 which is pretty hard to get from cheap 2gig kits.

1.5gig is the sweet spot as this is enough for pretty much all games. But, in order to get that you have to either sacrifice dual channel (i.e. sticks of different size) or run with 4 sticks (i.e. 2T).

2gig is what I would buy if I was building a new system, this should last until 2008 I would have thought.
 
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