is 4GB overkill

Hodge

Hodge

Hodge

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Joined
26 Nov 2006
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246
Location
Cheshire
I am about to buy this system would 4gb ram be overkill? My main use for this pc will be for ms Flight simulator (2004 and fsx)

system specs are
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket 775)

Asus P5B Deluxe (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB6400UDC)


Intel Core 2 Quadro Extreme Edition QX6700 "LGA775 Kentsfield" 2.66GHz (1066FSB) - Retail


Western Digital Raptor X 150GB WD1500AHFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM


BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 64-Bit Edition DVD - OEM - 1Pk (66R-00838)


Corsair HX 620W ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU (CMPSU-620HXUK)
 
If you can afford it, go for it, but mostly, i would say overkill. But, if you've got the money, use it however you want!
 
I was going to purchase 4GB myself last week but decided against it. Nothing utilizes that much memory at the moment. Unless your a power user I doubt you will use 4GB of RAM in the near future.
 
Remember 4x1GB means 2T command rate! Although if your good (OCing) you can drop that to 1T.

But then again there are 2GB dimms out there!
 
Wait until 2GB Dimms are more widespread. 4GB will not really be needed for another year or so and by then prices should have dropped.
 
I've just built an almost identical system with 4Gb RAM,
with the exception for the motherboard, i went for Intel Bad Axe 2. (see my post)

I'm sure SuperFetch in Vista will find a use for any amounts of spare Ram :)
 
4gb not overkill with vista (3gb sweet spot now but that means mixing 2x1gb and 2x512mb ram so best just to go the extra 1gb and order 4x1gb so thay are all the same , untill thay make 2gb DDR2 ram)

with 2gb of Ram i play BF2142 and BF2 when Both games are max out on video settings on vista i got Heavy Pageing on my hard drive and makes the game an tad unplayable

on XP i say its over kill as both games do not manage to fill the 2gb but with vista its an little over 2gb when in use i tested 3gb of ram on the vista Enterprise ver and all Disk Lag basicly whent puff (going to load vista ultima 64 soon as i got it half price of some one who gave up useing vista on his media pcs thay change way to manythings in vista overly compiclated)

XP only uses 100-200mb ram on fresh install Vista uses 500-600MB (depending on how much ram you have less ram vista auto cuts back some stuff) i just about to order the Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 TwinX (2x1GB) OcUk as i all ready have this no fuss ram in my pc so i have 4gb as well

allso there is an Bug in Nvidia's RAID driver you need to turn off Command Queing on the Nvidia SATA contorllers and that remove the most CPU use in Task man
 
leexgx said:
XP only uses 100-200mb ram on fresh install Vista uses 500-600MB (depending on how much ram you have less ram vista auto cuts back some stuff)
Click to expand...

Yup, but when you load games, Vista frees up most of that memory. It already has some useful stuff like dx9 librarys preloaded, since they're in use all the time. Its nowhere near as bad as people let on. I actually find Vista a lot more responsive in terms of loading games.
 
Hodge - this may be of interest to you (if you haven't already seen it):

http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?t=60002

It bears out bfars comments on faster game loads as this guy records a huge improvement on FSX game loading times.

Nooby RAM question: If you have multiple cores, does the RAM get split between the cores, so a 2Gb dual core system would only have 1 Gb allocated to each core, or is it a more flexible arrangement? If the former, then I can see 4gb being worthwhile.
 
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