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Thread ID: 51822 2004-11-30 21:07:00 Ram Increase noone (22) Press F1
Post ID Timestamp Content User
298375 2004-12-02 04:46:00 > does it only do the job ?

It occasionally gets me a beer as well ;)

It's usually too warm though :p
Raikyn (6293)
298376 2004-12-02 10:55:00 ram is cheap and i like that meaning i can spash out on it without denting any bank accounts to much , and most of the time you get a good boost from it noone (22)
298377 2004-12-03 02:20:00 I recently went from 256 to 512. Didnt notice anything. mejobloggs (264)
298378 2004-12-03 02:57:00 what os are you on , according to george12 that increase should be the best , and it is prob correct as most programs have requirements around the 256mark so if you go over to a certain point you will get a good boost noone (22)
298379 2004-12-03 04:09:00 No, the biggest increase is from 128MB to 256MB. A lot of second hand computers running Windows XP have 128MB of RAM, in fact I admit to selling many PCs on Trademe with this much. But adding another 128MB stick gives a MASSIVE performance increase to such PCs.

256MB to 512MB is the next best increase, but some users may actually notice little difference, depending on the task.

If you do a lot of

- Video editing / encoding
- File transfers
- Gaming
- Have SP2 (eats RAM)
- Multitasking

Then you will notice a great increase in performance, almost as big a difference as 128MB -> 256MB. However, if the PC is just used for light tasks like web browsing, e-mail and non-hungry games, then you may notice very little difference.

The BEST way to tell, is to see if you notice disk thrashing - constant hard disk activity when doing taxing things or running lots of programs, or notice that sometimes the hard drive goes hard-out and the pc slows to a crawl. If you notice this, you need more RAM. But if your system runs very smoothly, then more RAM may do little to increase your performance, and a different upgrade may be wiser.

Hope this helps:) Cheers George
george12 (7)
298380 2004-12-03 04:09:00 Man, did that sound like an FAQ or what :p george12 (7)
298381 2004-12-03 04:52:00 Have a read of this thread (forums.anandtech.com).

Ignore the morons going on about how '512 MB is better because there is no FPS increase in games'. A GB of RAM won't show the performance increase as FPS. It will show it as no stuttering in gameplay, better multitasking because of less pages out to the swap file on the hard disk.
E|im (87)
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