Extra memory- is it worth it?

Hi

I'm sure this question has been asked several times, but it's different with every case (no pun) so please bear with me.

Okay, my rig:

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
Athlon XP 2800+ Barton
80GB SATA, 40 GB IDE
Radeon 9800 Pro
Santa Cruz
...and 512 MB PC3200 Corsair valueram

Now, for just pitching $80, I can get another stick of 512 raising it to 1GB (I know I won't really need more than that), but I'd like to know other's opinions. You're gonna ask what I do mainly, so I'll answer in ranking of most CPU intensive to least, assuming I do all fairly equally.

1) Video authoring
2) DVD dec/encoding
3) Gaming (UT04, BF: Vietnam, & eventually Doom3)
4) Surfing
5) Music organizing/mass editing

I know it's fairly vague, but I, as almost any geek, try to do almost everything with my PC. Get back to me. Thanks!

 

i just added another stick of 512 to my rig, and i noticed a nice performance increase when gaming...not a big increase in other apps, but noticable. imo, its worth it.

 

If you won't miss the money, yes. 512MB will be OK, but the extra memory definitely won't hurt.

 

YES! A little memory never hurt anybody. You should see a performance increase with adding an extra stick. You might want to see what the maximum size of memory your board can handle.

 

I think it's 3GB, but I'm a college student... I can't afford 3x 1GB sticks, let alone one.

 

Thanks you three for your input. Greatly appreciated

 

I have the same board, same 3200 - 512 memory. I had another stick of PC2100 memory sitting around, so I put it in, slowed the PC3200 down to match it, and they are running in Dual channel. I have noticed an increase in programs opening, and executing. Probably due more to the dual channel than the 1 gig,, but I'll take that.

 

Well, 512 is recommnded for gamers.
But everyone knows that bigger is better for Gaming, and other uses.
I have 769MB DDR PC3200 RAM.

 

Thanks you all for your tips. Just fyi, I ordered the memory yesterday (along with a new case: Antec Sonata.. hehe).

This site's growing on me. The quickness of everyone's responses really surprised me. I'm used to waiting for at least a couple days on other forums, not a couple minutes.

Good idea. Even though I already bought the memory, I'll do that anyway when I get home from work, just for curiosity's sake. Thanks Mastertech.