Should i bother upgrading to 4GB RAM?

Legend · 4 Mar 2008 at 12:31

I'm wondering if i'll see much gain with my current spec. I haven't overclocked any of this.

Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 2.4GHz
Intel BX2 motherboard
2GB Team DDR2 PC2-6400 (4-4-4-10) RAM
GeForce 8800GTX
Windows Vista x64

I play the odd game, use Photoshop all the time, and some video editing. Would i see much performance gain with an extra 2GB? 2GB of the same RAM will cost me about £70. Is it worth it?

eddiew · 4 Mar 2008 at 15:42

For a self-help answer, keep your task manager open and watch how much memory is in use/free when you do various tasks. If you're pushing close to (or over) 2GB, the answer is likely a huge amount - if you're not, you'll gain nothing at all.

That said, I love my 4GB. Photoshop, browsers, games, virtual PC all at once? Well, why not

Asha'man · 5 Mar 2008 at 15:59

Yes I believe 4gb is going to beneficial. Especiallly if you are running vista which is resource hungry.

Adrianr · 5 Mar 2008 at 18:45

Photoshop is brilliant with more ram. The less you can get it using the scratchdisk the better. It can only use just over 3GB but if you have more it uses it as an initial scratchdisk before going to the actual hardrive. Suffice to say even editing very large things i rarely (if ever) get loading bars.

littledave · 5 Mar 2008 at 18:55

If you got 64bit Vista soon then oh yes baby

Adrianr · 5 Mar 2008 at 19:03

littledave said:
If you got 64bit Vista soon then oh yes baby

I swear i read a review somewhere comparing the memory gain between 64 and 32bit Vista. It essentially concluded that due to the extra memory 64bit processes take up, the extra increase in RAM is negligable if you have 4GB of ram, and so upgrading to 64bit for the memory increase is only worth it with 5GB+.

Guess i'l have to put another 4GB in to make me feel better then

littledave · 5 Mar 2008 at 20:47

With RAM being so cheap atm think im gonna get another 4GB

PhillyDee · 6 Mar 2008 at 09:02

I would. Especially for video editing/photoshop. Vista and them proggys love their ram.

Rackerz · 6 Mar 2008 at 11:10

Adrianr said:
I swear i read a review somewhere comparing the memory gain between 64 and 32bit Vista. It essentially concluded that due to the extra memory 64bit processes take up, the extra increase in RAM is negligable if you have 4GB of ram, and so upgrading to 64bit for the memory increase is only worth it with 5GB+.

Guess i'l have to put another 4GB in to make me feel better then

Haven't heard that myself, you don't notice a slow down with 64Bit Vista anyway, it's quicker than the 32bit version ever was for me.

pegasus1 · 8 Mar 2008 at 20:28

4gb will only cost you about £54. http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-086-OC&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=813

Adrianr · 9 Mar 2008 at 20:48

Rackerz said:
Haven't heard that myself, you don't notice a slow down with 64Bit Vista anyway, it's quicker than the 32bit version ever was for me.

Phew, not going mad

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/15/vista_workshop/index.html

"The upshot is that it doesn't make sense to install a 64-bit version of Vista in order to better utilize 4 GB of memory simply because the 32 bit version would only recognize 3.5 GB. The problem is that while it is true that you would "gain" the missing memory, you would also immediately lose it to the system due to the 64-bit version's larger memory footprint. Thus, using a 64-bit version really only makes sense with larger memory sizes."

Personally, i have noticed 64bit to be snappier than 32bit also. Though with 4GB of ram i've not really noticed a slowdown in anything yet!