Memory upgrade, need quick advice

[ringoffire]

Since newegg is having a 15% off sale, I am thinking about upgrading ram.

I have 2x2gb Mushkin DDR2 800. Would it be worth it to get DDR21150 or something? My board supports it. I do overclock, but if I am not going to see a significant performance improvement then I dont want to do it.

If not, is it worth it to just pick up another 4gb of DDR2800 ram for 30$? Will I see any performance gains from 8gb of ram vs 4gb? I have 64bit and I game. Processor is a Q6600 and board is a P45.

 

[Mike Clements]

WIth a Q6600, you probably aren't going to go way past a 400FSB. Assuming a 400 FSB x 9 which would give you 3.6ghz running DDR1066 vs 3.6ghz/DDR800 would give you about a 2%-5% performance gain across most applications. It's a small gain

As for 4GB vs 8GB, I'd suggest you examine your memory usage with Process Explorer and the Windows System Manager.

 

[PC_User]

1. You will not notice a real-world difference between DDR2 800 and DDR2 1150. DDR2 800 will also allow for tighter timings.

2. In gaming, you will not notice a difference between 4GB and 8GB of RAM. You will gain an improvement in performance if you work with photo editing or video encoding programs where you can use some of the ram as ramdisk.

 

[Mike Clements]

2. In gaming, you will not notice a difference between 4GB and 8GB of RAM.

It depends on the game and the OS really. With Vista 64, 6GB of memory, and Warhammer Online, I've seen about 3.81GB of memory usage total. That's with no A/V, no anti spyware, no chat, etc, ....just the OS and the game.