Computer upgrade - recommendations?

[TeeJayHoward]

Well, it's finally happened. Ka-boom. All of a sudden, my RAM is making funky smells, and my computer is beeping at me.

I need new memory. But that's not all. I'm looking at spending about $500, and have a quick question on "Just how much memory is too much?".

I use VMWare, do some video reencoding, and love rendering things in Maya.

I've got 512MB of crap ram. Well, HAD that amount. It's fried. It was slow. Very slow. I'm looking at new ram now, OCZ PC3200 EL Plat. 1GB kits. Question is, do I need 1 or 2GB of memory? I've never run these apps on a nice machine before

 

[vamp]

Unless you're planning on OCing, you're probably better off with 2 gigs of "value" ram than 1 gig of high performance stuff for around same price.

 

[Vertigo Acid]

If you hadn't said VMware, I would say stick with just a gig, but it really would benifit from being able to give each virtual machine more RAM. A gig of (insert favorite memory brand here) valueram would be the best IMO