How much RAM is enuff?

[WhiteHawk]

Went thru a period of bad frame rate when the view got
real busy.  Seems to be much worse in AH then in any of
my other flight sims.    Couldnt find the answer.   Was doing some work on my puter and popped in an old 128 meg memory
stick, and it improved my general frame rate by 50%.
  I had 512 meg to start with.  I thought that should be
plenty.
  How much RAM is plenty?
  I have p4 1.7 GHz
  640  SDRAM 133
  Gforce 4 440.
Is SDRAM 133 the same reguardless of the maker?
or some brands perform better than others?
ANybody ever had a BAD memory stick that didnt show
up in the system tests?
thnx for replies

[mrsid2]

You have totally wrong type of ram to start with.

Your PIV is crippled by your sdram motherboard. Replace that if you want boost in your framerates (get ddr.)

Another thing that holds you back heavy is the MX440 but that's another story.

Get a decent motherboard that supports DDR.

[woodfordb]

Yes there are differant types of SDRam.
Even though the clock rate of 133 is the same, some ram is CAS 2 (Fast) Cas 2.5 (Med) Cas 3 (Slow).

Most cheap unbranded ram is usual 3 or 2.5, decent ram from some of the big brands (Corsair, Kingston etc) is 2 but the price is higher.

The previous post is right though. P4's love ram bandwidth. SDRAM cripples a P4. Get a new board with DDR ram, the faster the better. If you really want to blow loads of money go for a RDRam board and use PC1066 ram. Though this ram has disadvantages of having a higher latency than DDR ram, but overall through put is higher.

Im guessing your P4 is the socket 423 variant? if so you might struggle to find a board that is worth upgrading to as the 423 only went to 2ghz.

Regards

Mandrill