is 1Gb of ram a good bare minimum?

taz488 · 9 Jul 2006 at 17:59

Originally Posted by Cyber-Mav
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.

rubbish, 1gb is enough for almost any game if you have good gpu + cpu

2gb is needed if you want max settings on all new games

4gb is not needed unless doing serious graphics stuff that i dont know about :confused:

i play half life 2 on crap system with 640mb ram, you telling me my system wont play half life 1?

2gb 'good enough'!!! 2gb is plainly good enough for any game on max settings, this may change with all the new dx10 and multithreading but for now 2gb enough for anyone.

Cyber-Mav · 9 Jul 2006 at 18:04

bah these days graphics cards are comming with 1 gig of ram onboard. its gonna be real dumb to get less than 2 gigs of system ram. unless your skint and don;t have the cash then its understandable.

FreeStream · 9 Jul 2006 at 18:23

Cyber-Mav said:
bah these days graphics cards are comming with 1 gig of ram onboard. its gonna be real dumb to get less than 2 gigs of system ram. unless your skint and don;t have the cash then its understandable.

No, your wrong. BF2 uses about 420Mb gfx mem, infact im pretty sure I could run BF2 at the Ultra High with only 1Gb has my X1900XT contains all the stuff it needs, textures etc which use up the most of the ram next to mesh details which is probably in the gfx mem too. Why is mem usage increasing? Detailed textures? Whedre do these textures go? To the gfx mem!!, Eg. BF2 uses 440Mb at Ultra High, someone with a 256Mb card would benifit from 2Gb, but one with a 512Mb may not benefit at all or not as much as the guy with a 256Mb card.

1Gb is fine for a normal gamer, 2Gb is only for hardcore gamers and its going to be ATLEAST a year before we even have a wiff of that being filled, infact the only thing I can think of that has a chance of filling that up is FS-X.

No gaming = 512Mb
Light gaming, occasional tought game, EG BF2/MS FS 2004 = 1Gb
Hard gaming, constant BF2/Oblivion = 2Gb.

However, if you have anything under a XP2500/6600 then 2Gb is wasted.

You have the have the correct balance.

Eg,
1. X1900XT-X, Conroe 6600 = 2Gb
2. XP2500, 9800 Pro 256Mb = 1Gb (Example - systems like this may benefit from 2Gb, however I highly doubt it.)

Because if you have a rubbish CPU and GPU then 2Gb of ram will do sod all to performance.

I only recently got 1Gb in my PM G4 and I do heavy photo and video editing, and guess what? I hardly noticed a difference, must be im CPU limited!!

Cyber-mav, how much of the time do you use more than 2Gb, and don't say gaming BECAUSE ITS NOT TRUE!

CR.

matt_fsr · 11 Jul 2006 at 15:19

Ye Gods... some people referring to 'back in the day' with 256Mb RAM

- our helpdesk PC's run 24x7 basis and have just been upgraded to 512Mb after *lots* of complaining and whining.

On a day shift we run the following continuously:
2 TS windows for email boxes
HPOV service desk fat client (yeah, 120Mb of fat memory eater)
Outlook 2003
Excel
Word
MSN messenger
3 IE windows rock mimimum, more depending on information required
SecureRemote client

and other apps when needed :eek:

512Mb makes this lot pretty happy together, my gaming rig has 1Gb of Geil and that rarely has cause to thrash swap file, only HD activity is required is on loading.

HangTime · 11 Jul 2006 at 19:00

matt_fsr said:
Ye Gods... some people referring to 'back in the day' with 256Mb RAM

- our helpdesk PC's run 24x7 basis and have just been upgraded to 512Mb after *lots* of complaining and whining.

512meg? Lucky

The PC managing all the daily mailmerging (large documents, some over 1000 pages in size plus images) for one of our workstreams has a whopping 64meg RAM.

p4radox · 11 Jul 2006 at 22:14

I'd call 256 a bare minimum (for XP). But for older games 512 is good. 1Gb for newish games, and 2Gb for a select few games (BF2, FEAR).

Cyber-Mav · 11 Jul 2006 at 22:29

ram is cheap these days, just get as much as you can afford.

FreeStream · 12 Jul 2006 at 00:42

Cyber-Mav said:
ram is cheap these days, just get as much as you can afford.

Erm, its a waste of money, esp on DDR, and esp on some systems when performance can be reduced.

There is no reasoning behind buying for the hell of it, I could get a G5 with 16Gb ram in for £400, I can afford it but why!?

Really, mate stop pimping lots of mem, because in 99% of the situations it is a waste.

matt100 · 12 Jul 2006 at 14:22

I think you 2 like winding each other up

I think cyber mav has a small point in that its cheap enough to have a little bit too much just to make sure which is why I'm happy to have 2gb although I'm fairly sure I don't need it. Its is though as CR says utterly pointless to go buying loads too much simply because its cheap.

Beer is cheap and you can never have too much of that

TheVoice · 14 Jul 2006 at 14:27

My desktop has 1GB and it's been perfectly capable in the latest games. Not saying that more RAM wouldn't help (I do intend to upgrade it to 2GB), but 1GB is still enough.

512MB is the minimum I'd want to have on any machine I use though. 256MB is just too slow, even for reasonably basic stuff. My notebook that I'm using at the moment (till I get my PC back out of storage in September) is 512MB, and it seems to "forget" apps more frequently, and thus has to pull them off the hard-drive again. My PC, on the other hand, would be far quicker. Gaming isn't an issue because I don't play any new games on it.

Have considered upping it to 1GB, but it's too much expense and hassle to do that, seeing as I'll have my PC back soon enough. The notebook won't get nearly as much use after that.

Steedie · 14 Jul 2006 at 18:29

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.

Oh dear :/

Fool tbh

if you honestly believe that then....=X

I thought you were just trying to defend your decision for buying 4gb before with all your posts, but i can now see your clearly deluded

benjo plz. · 14 Jul 2006 at 20:35

Cyber-Mav said:
1gb: good enough to run basic games like tombraider 1, doom 2, films, half life 1.

Back in the good ol' days when HL1 was released people were playing it on 64mb of ram

.

FreeStream · 14 Jul 2006 at 22:02

Steedie said:
Oh dear :/

Fool tbh

if you honestly believe that then....=X

I thought you were just trying to defend your decision for buying 4gb before with all your posts, but i can now see your clearly deluded

He hasn't posted in here for a while, wonder why?

Energize · 21 Jul 2006 at 01:44

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555223

As you can see one program can only use 2GB of ram if not optimised for more, which btw games aren't. Thus for running a game by itself anything over 2.25GiB is useless, 2gb for the game 256mb for processes. On windows xp anyway.

LewisStuart · 21 Jul 2006 at 19:51

HangTime said:
512meg? Lucky The PC managing all the daily mailmerging (large documents, some over 1000 pages in size plus images) for one of our workstreams has a whopping 64meg RAM.

One of the old pc's at my work takes 15 mins to boot up Win2k :eek:

must be on about 32mb