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More Memory Vs. Dual Channel

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Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 29, 2003
Messages
113
I have been playing Planetside a lot recently and hear that the game is memory intensive. I Alt-Tab'd out and did a task manager and found out that PS alone was using 890 megs (that is at its worst).

I have 2x512 on the rig below and I was considering buying one more stick of the 512 ram to fill up my third slot. Would the performance gain with the extra ram overall be better without dual channel or would less ram with dual channel be better?

I will upgrade CPU probably in 6 months. A friend of mine gave it to me to help me get a better rig going. This was like 2 months ago. So I want to use it for a while. So I am really only asking about the memory now.

Any thoughts or links to test would be appreciated.
 
more ram....

played with dual channel and it really seems to not affect much in terms of performance.... also read reviews that confirm what I found...

QwertyJuan
 
Dual channel on an AMD system isn't going to do much for you. Maybe 5% or so. I'd gladly give up that tiny bit for an extra 512 MB of memory.
 
I don't think you'll notice the extra memory, at least not enough to justify the extra $
 
Originally posted by haroldmeyer
I don't think you'll notice the extra memory, at least not enough to justify the extra $
Click to expand...

He just said planetside was using 890 at worst. That leaves very little for the OS, meaning he is probably using the swap file.

You probably wont notice the difference between running dual channel and single channel. I'd go for it, better just a tiny bit slower overall and have it run smoothly then a slightly faster system that has periodic slowdowns.

Edit: wee post 1000
 
Thx.. for the help.. I will probably pull trigger and go with the extra ram. I figure it will help with the new generation of games coming out too.
 
Are you sure that Planetside is using 890MB of RAM? Go back into the game and Alt-Tab out and click on the Performance tab in task manager and see what your total available under Physical Memory is.

That must be one hell of a RAM hog if it uses that much. You must be eating all over the page file if its using that much because i have 1GB of RAM in my machine and i only have 833MB physical memory available when i'm not doing anything at all.
 
It was a little while ago that I happened to notice how much ram was used. If I am overstating, it is not by too much. I was actually using roger wilco at the time and made a comment about how ridiculous it is. Before I log off tonight, I will Alt+Tab out take another look. I remember it being enormous. The sound file alone is over 200 meg. It is all the sounds in one WAV. Kinda crazy. I broke down and bought the an Athlon 3000 too. I figured that this will be the last upgrade on this system in a while. I got the Audigy 2 ZS last weekend, which I am not completely impressed with. That is another post ;).
 
ive heard at least with the pentium 4 that you can add a 3rd ram dim and not loose dual channel?
 
Originally posted by RM_Bulldog
ive heard at least with the pentium 4 that you can add a 3rd ram dim and not loose dual channel?
Click to expand...

I think that is if you go and get a setup like 512 on one channel by itself and 2x256 on the second channel working together. But in his case, he will have to purchase 1GB of Ram to occupy one channel and use the 2x512MB as the other channel, but that will be quite expensive. Also, I think it is okay for an AMD system to do that but not an Intel system. Correct me if I am wrong...
 
Originally posted by RM_Bulldog
ive heard at least with the pentium 4 that you can add a 3rd ram dim and not loose dual channel?
Click to expand...

Ah....no

Intel boards treat each slot as a channel. Therefore the memory in each slot must match. That is why they have 4 slots.

On an Nforce2 AMD board, there are only 2 channels. One slot is one channel, and the other 2 slots are the second channel. So, you could have a 512 MB stick, and 2 256 MB sticks, if in the right slots, and still run dual channel.
 
it seems to me that if ANY current game requires more than 1GB RAM, something's wrong with the setup...

but yeah, AMD systems don't benefit too much from dual channel so go ahead and get more RAM if you're convinced it's a hardware issue.
 
The only real benefit to dual channel on nforce boards is if you're using onboard video. Otherwise it's just a marketing gimmick.
 
Originally posted by hordaktheman
The only real benefit to dual channel on nforce boards is if you're using onboard video. Otherwise it's just a marketing gimmick.
Click to expand...
actually i had never heard this. but i suppose anyone whos willing to spend the money on the dual channel ram isnt going to be using onboard video.
 
I played PS tonight and exited the "game world" but was still in the select server screen. Now check this out. I alt-tab'd to check anyway and PS was still using 677meg. I waited one minute to see if it changed and it held steady. That was when I was not actually on a continent. That is lame. Fortunately I can afford to upgrade and I am sure that it wont hurt with newer games coming out this year. Overall, Sony should shoot themselves for designing it like that. It usually doesn't play bad with my current set up, but I would hate to imagine how it would play with less RAM.
 
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