Advice on Memory Requirements

I'm currently building up a replacement HTPC for myself. Im on a bit of a budget and I'm just wondering what peoples opinions are. I was initially going with 4gb of ram, but in order to save a few extra $$$ (I just bought a house and need tonnes of things...) I was thinking of going with 2gb. DDR-3 memory is still a little pricey by comparison.

All this box is going to do is run Vista Media center in my living room.

Will be paired with an Asus M4A78T-E / AMD Phenom X3 720 BE CPU.

Do you think 2gb would run vista media center smoothly?

I imagine it would, but I'm looking for someones real world experience.

TIA..

 

It really does not take a lot of horsepower in terms of CPU and RAM for a media center. 2Gb is fine so save your money and put it towards better graphics. And don't forget a good UPS with AVR to protect your investment.

 

I am running a rig with 4gb of DDR3 and a GTX295 graphics card but to be honest it is way overkill for general use.
DDR3 is fast and 2gb for a media machine is plenty plus you can always add more at a later date when the budget allows.

 

He is correct.

And ram can easily be upgraded in the future.

And Note if your running 32bit vista, it will only use up to 3GB of ram anyway.

You need a 64bit OS to use more than that.

Cheers.

 

Just thought I would follow up, looks like things worked out in my favor anyways. I popped into my local TigerDirect outlet and they had a 4gb kit of Corsair xms3 modules in the "open box" bin, so I was able to purchase the 4gb kit for nearly the price of 2gb.

So I'm good, the system is up and running and works like a champ.

Now i'm just seeing how many MHz I can wring out of this little 720 BE phenom

 

Just don't go too far too fast.
A little change,then run for a while to check for stability.

 

I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the new phenom II cpu.
With no trouble at all I got it to 3.4ghz rock stable. With a little more tweaking I'm sure it could go higher. But to be honest, in the end I ended up just running it @ stock speed.

As said, this is for a media center,and so a big priority for me is silence. There was a slightly more noticeable whir @ 3.4ghz from the fans, and even though the benchmarks dont lie, I'm not convinced for its intended purpose the difference in performance would be noticeable. I do think the noise level would be.

While the i7's still take the outright performance cake, it is nice to know that AMD has some credible players against Intel's camp once again, at least in the value department.

Thanks again to all for your input.