Using 4 strips of ram bad??

K

Kaizer

Gawd
Joined
Jul 9, 2001
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I was asking in another thread about possible upgrades for my pc, and I was considering getting 2 more 512 strips for my pc. I was informed in that thread it would be a bad idea to use 4 strips.. I had never heard of that as being bad. Im sure its not as "good" as using 2 1gb chips.. but is the performance really that much worse?
 
I am using 4 sticks of generic 512mb ram in my Gateway now and have no problems at all. Just make sure it has a good warranty on the ram and you should be ok. 2 sticks of 1gb ram is always good to free up ram slots but if you're not overclocking then 4x512 is fine.
 
With 4 sticks you'll have to drop to 2T timings, which is said to have a 15-20% performance hit in some apps, but again, unless you're OCing like mad you won't notice much of a difference. Chances are the extra RAM will just speed things up :p
 
Good to hear. Im not OCing at all. Just want to play WoW with a little less chunkyness when it comes to high population areas.. I can always hear my hard drive chugging away.. ive been told by other players the extra gb really helps.
 
15-20% drop in performance is complete Bullshit. You do not know what you are talking about. It is more like 2-3% in most apps. 10% at the ABSOLUTE MOST in maybe one to two apps. Most programs, games show a 2-3% dip in performance. Please reasearch the facts before you post false numbers like you just did...This is for all of our sakes, especially the n00bies around here who don't necessarily keep up-to-date.
 
I don't think another gig will make WoW run any better unless you're really pounding rocks with background applications. Before you run out and buy a whole bunch of memory, you should probably tackle some (free) issues concerning PC maintainence.

Go to a website like tweakxp.com or about a dozen similar places and follow the simple early steps, e.g. uninstall old applications, make sure you're not drowning yourself with unnecessary processes. . .then evaluate your other hardware as potential bottlenecks. First of all, if your graphics card is RAM-lite it just may not run WoW at 16 x 12 no matter how much system RAM you have. So what other hardware do you have in your rig? And remember, Windows has some signifigant diminished returns after a few install-uninstall software and hardware cycles, especially if you try a bunch of free webby software and decide to get rid of it and it's uninstall method is sub-par.

Run some spyware removal stuff, run some virus removal stuff, defragment your hard drive. . .if your Windows install is much older than a year consider a clean start. Evaluate the rest of your computer, not just your RAM. There's lots to do before you drop your wad on something that you don't know will make any difference whatsoever.
 
Wow should run better with more RAM. However I do suggest cleaning up windows as an extra step.

I neglected to mention that you should get the same type and revision of RAM. So if you have Corsair now, get corsair of the same make/model/revision.
 
Im not a computer n00b.. my machine is pretty clean. However.. I do a ton of stuff at the same time on it.. gaming.. my ftp, bittorrent.. sometimes a web cam, Trillian.. I know.. im pushing my machine. My ram is usaually at 98% while in WoW.

Im going to be buying a new machine in the next month or two to be for gaming only.. and all this other crap will stay on my current machine.

Im a network admin by trade.. but I havent had as much time lately to keep up with all the info on whats "good" and "bad". Thanks for the input!
 
WoW doesn't take advantage of that extra RAM, at least, not when I run it, at 1280x1024. With little exception, I don't usually see any game I play, BF2 excepted, (I haven't purchased FEAR yet) I don't exceed a 650mb footprint. This includes Windows XP64 running, and it boots with about 230-250 footprint.

Because so much of that (Windows) gets paged when you run a full-screen application, it does make a difference to have enough space on your hard drive for a single 300-500mb page file. It's important that your swap partition isn't fragmented and has a good amount of free space. Hard drive file transfers are a very common bottleneck that affect almost everyone.
 
Well, shit, if you need to run that many little apps, and you are building an entirely new computer (by the way, Trillian is a hog, get http://gaim.sourceforge.net/ GAIM) save your money for the upgrade. Use it to go dual-core, and start with a good dual-channel pair of 2gb RAM sticks. If you're not an overclocker, get an X2, if you ARE an overclocker, I'd take the Opteron plunge. Here's a RAM review for you: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Mushkin/XP4000-2GB/
 
If your motherboard runs in duel channel then its best you get the same brand and timing that the other two sticks are.

That way there wont be conflicts.

If your first two sticks are 2-2-2-5 and you buy 2 others at 2-3-3-5 youmight run into problems in duel channel.

Size doesnt matter(128,512), so get any size you want but get the same brand and speed for duel channel.
 
its a known fact that WoW does in fact like the extra ram. and personally, I think 2 gigs is a good idea regardless. cuz other games use it also, like everquest 2 and BF2. and, alt tabbing a game actually works when you have 2 gigs of ram. AND, new games are gonna love that ram. I say get it dood, you won't wanna go back. I did, for a bit, cuz i wanted a freind to have some ram that worked garunteed, I hated that short time that i had to go back to just 1 gig. also, that extra gig will help especially if you don't have a top of the line processor and top of the line video card---which hide the fact that your computer is actually running crappy--that 2 gigs will allow mid range hardware to shine to its fullest.
 
Well, for the board that is in Kaizer's sig, "3 x 184-pin DIMM Sockets" is listed for his NFII board which makes sense. NFII boards were hit and miss with 4 dimms filled and still being to run mem at PC3200. Some boards, like my old Gigabyte NFII 7N400Pro2 would go to 333 with all four dimm slots populated. Ran at 400 with only 3 dimm slots populated. Whether populating 4 dimms on a motherboad is bad, always RTFM and all that jive.
 
iSkylla said:
15-20% drop in performance is complete Bullshit. You do not know what you are talking about. It is more like 2-3% in most apps. 10% at the ABSOLUTE MOST in maybe one to two apps. Most programs, games show a 2-3% dip in performance. Please reasearch the facts before you post false numbers like you just did...This is for all of our sakes, especially the n00bies around here who don't necessarily keep up-to-date.
Click to expand...

Calm yourself there nubskates, 15-20% is a direct quote from cfEclipse, also if you'd take the time to read my post rather than flaming like a tool you would have read that I said "which is said to have...".

lrn2read.

In reality I've never seen more than a 2% drop, and that's only in some apps, WoW however benefits greatly from more RAM.
 
Gillette said:
Calm yourself there nubskates, 15-20% is a direct quote from cfEclipse, also if you'd take the time to read my post rather than flaming like a tool you would have read that I said "which is said to have...".
Click to expand...
show me where i said that ;)
 
Lol, RAM kind of looks like bacon, so it can be considered strips. Especially Red Heatspreaders, it looks enen more like Bacon!

Gillette, would you like me to get the test where they SHOW the actually impact? I am happy to do so...
 
Gillette said:
It was a post a few months ago, I'm too lazy to dig it up.
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i see... well, basically, i never said that. i might have said that the difference is 10-15% of pure memory performance, which is like 1-5% actual performance difference, benching aside ;)

though, once you factor in the 166mhz divider, the performance hit gets a bit bigger :(
 
Aha, that must be where I got your words mixed up, 10-15% memory performance :p

Thanks for clarifying.
 
it might, it might not. i was playing around with some pc3700EB before, 2xx512mb sticks. made it to 260mhz with just those two. put in my ballistix to go with it.. and made it to 260mhz :D :p

it's very memory controller dependant. i happen to have one that likes 512mb sticks. 1gb is a different matter ;)
 
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