Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?

[BaldEagl]

Nvidea 9600gt is about $140 now. Ram is cheap.

It went up since yesterday?  $110 on newegg.

DO NOT put in 3 1 gig sticks of RAM if it's DDR2.  It will take it out of dual channel mode.  You want PAIRS of matched sticks.

[Fulmar]

Honestly, his system is very similar to what my old one was (replaced Jan 07).  It ran AH fairly good (it would dip into the 20's when flying near a smoking base with lots of cons) otherwise 40-50+, no high res packs but I believe I ran it at 1280x968 or whatever.  I had P4 (Northwood 533mhz FSB) 2.8ghz, 1gb DDR 333mhz, and an 5900XT.

He's most likely has a PresHott, and DDR.  Although I can't say if its dual-channel or not.  My Asus P4S8X board circa 2003 did not have dual channel.  He has an AGP card so it makes no sense to recommend PCI-E cards (your Nvidia 9600's).

My opinion is that adding 1gb of RAM (dual channel sticks or just 1 stick) and upgrading the graphics card could make a nice difference.  The amount of ram in that computer and that terrible FX5200 are really holding back that P4 CPU.  For +/- $100 you could see a marked improvement for the short term if you mainly play Aces High.

 SAPPHIRE 100175L Radeon X1650PRO 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 AGP 4X/8X Video Card - Retail - $62.99
*I went with this card because of PSU limitations.  He did not say what he had but the 1650 needs a 350 watt PSU which is reasonable and this card won't break the bank and/or be too powerful for the old P4 cpu.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102073

 WINTEC AMPO 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Desktop Memory - Retail $18.99
* This is pretty cheap for old DDR and you could buy 2 if you motherboard supports dual channel.  Totaling your system at 1.5gb or 2gb.  Granted dual channel would give you a performance boost, but its not gonna make or break the system if you're in a bind.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161626

Now I only recommend these upgrades if:
A) You main game is Aces High and you spend a great majority of playing it and will continue to in the future.
B) You're on a budget and cannot afford a new system in say 5-6 months time.

If you say no to any of the above, then I'd recommend saving that $100 and waiting to get a whole new system which depending on what parts you reuse, can get a nice gaming rig for $400-700.

[drdeathx]

if he has agp video card will be less!!! Nice Find on the 9600gt bald!!!!

 I spent $400 on me gtx280  lol... shoulda shopped with u!

[Krusty]

You can get a decent AGP card fairly cheap these days...  The Geforce 6800GS, 7800GS, or ATI 3870 are all great cards for AGP(you may need a better powersupply if you upgrade videocard)...  The difference will be night and day..
And by the way, don't listen to ANYTHING Krustsack (Krusty) says..  The Geforce 7600 GS/GT is substandard on any level...  Why he thinks it's good when the facts show it's not a performer by any means is beyond me...  And beyond him apparently... 

While anodizer keeps his very biased opinion in the face of the facts and chooses to throw his insults around in this forum defies all logic.

The Ge7600GT outperforms the Ge7800GS, even. It handily outperforms the Ge6800 that Anodizer loves so much and glows about unendingly. He simply refuses to acknowledge these facts that EVERY benchmark test ever made has to show us.

As an example of how the 7600GT (and even the 7600GS in some cases) outperform the 6800GT, please see the following links:

http://xtreview.com/review140.htm

English is a bit broken, but scroll down to see the many performance comparison charts, across MANY games, and MANY settings. I think in all but 1 of them the Ge7600GT beats the 6800GT, and in all of them it beats the 7800S too.


http://www.penstarsys.com/reviews/video/evga/7600gtco/index.html

Here's a pretty in-depth review. Practical one, too. Says he thought it would be good to test against the 6600 but that it literally just blew that card into the dust, so he ran it against a 6800 GT thinking it would maybe be par, but it outpaced the 6800 GT.

Here, let's cut to the third page for the 6800/7600 comparison:
http://www.penstarsys.com/reviews/video/evga/7600gtco/7600gt_3.htm

Anodizer has tried insulting at me in-game as well, to the point I had to squelch him to continue playing. He seems to have some grudge.



[Edited to tone down my response]

[Fulmar]

They don't even make the 6800GT anymore IIRC.  That card is quite old.  Only thing I could find that is new (non-eBay) was a 6800XT.  Like I said before, w/o knowing more details on the current computer (mainly his PSU and what model motherboard he has), we can't go much further.  Any video card is going to be an improvement over the bad FX5200, and I mean anything.  But for PSU/budget reasons (and CPU bottleneck), we cannot recommend too powerful of a video card such as the ATI 38XX series or any of the higher power hungry 7XXX series nvidia cards.

I use to disagree with Krusty a while back on the 8800 cards, but I don't recall ever calling him out in a thread.  We should be posting to help someone and leave our egos at least in game.

[NOT]

my system See's 3.5g of 4g

XP only addresses 4gb of memory, so anything that uses memory takes from the total. if you have a 512vid card, and4 gb of ram, you will see about 3.5. anything else that xp allocates as memory will subtract from that total. my post was a general, rule of thumb answer, not a definitive amount.

The reason why you install 4 gigs of ram as opposed to 3 gigs of ram is on most, if not all motherboards if you want to run your ram in dual channel mode you have to install it in pairs

if you install 2 sticks of ram, they are running in dual channel.




NOT

[drdeathx]

XP WILL NOT USE ALL 4 G OF RAM IT USES (IF I'M NOT MISTAKIN) 3328 MB. ITS A FACT..... GC WILL TAKE A CHUNK BUT 4G IS A WASTE. The difference between 2 g and 3g is minimal unless you are multi tasking. Stick WITH 2G. 4G will not hurt at all.

I run 1g memory on my  board with 4g  2 x 2g cards and dxdiag shows 3328. If your formula was correct I would only be running 3096 on my ram>>>> If you run a 128 m card it will still show as 3328 a 64m card 3328. Thats as high as it will go!


64 bit XP will use all 4g.

[NOT]

interesting, i have 4gb installed with 512 on the vid card, plus 364mb page file, showing 3072mb of ram. but hey, i didnt write the OS.




NOT

[MrRiplEy[H]]

These memory arguments are totally useless, you will lose more time reading this thread than you'll ever save by getting whatever memory.

Just slap 4 gigs of generic ram in, XP will use all it can and you will never need to buy more ram again as long as you use the 32-bit XP.

Latencies, 3 gigs or 4 gigs, PC ratings whatever are totally useless to bicker about because the differences are so marginal. Only if you run a high-end PC say $4000 price range should you start worrying about ram latencies. PC ratings come to play only if overclocking hard (as long as you have at least minimum required by your CPU)

[Fulmar]

Additionally, its not like 2x1gb / 2x512mb stick combos are going to break the bank over 2x2gb sticks.

[drdeathx]

Rip you gonna pay for it? maybe the dude should use 2 x 1g sticks.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Rip you gonna pay for it? maybe the dude should use 2 x 1g sticks.

He can use 16Mb for all I care. Ram is so cheap nowadays anyway that there's no sensible point not to get the max possible. If the extra $20 will break his bank then he should get 2 gigs or stick with 1 gig. I mean I get $20 for typing this much stuff at work.

[DREDIOCK]

if you install 2 sticks of ram, they are running in dual channel.




NOT

Yes. "Pairs" usually does indicate 2 of something LOL 

[Spatula]

Spend the money replacing the FX5200, it will make more difference. There's loads of cheap 2nd hand stuff out there that will mince the 5200. The 5200 was always a low-end card, and several generations old now.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Spend the money replacing the FX5200, it will make more difference. There's loads of cheap 2nd hand stuff out there that will mince the 5200. The 5200 was always a low-end card, and several generations old now.

While I fully agree with that, he needs to spend more than 1 gigs ram worth to displaycard. However Spatula is right, if the machine has a minimum of 1 Gb ram the bottleneck is the displaycard in most games.