How much difference does RAM make?

Hi,

Ive been running on 4gb Ram (probably, one is faulty and could have been faulty for some time) Due to varying reasons im upgrading to 8 gb, using 2 of these.

Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit

I have the i5 intel processor on the Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 Mobo

And a HD 5070 1gb Graphics card.

Finaly there is a 1tb Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache HDD

Will there be any improvement in my system with the increase of the RAM?

Also ill be looking and another upgrade come christmas, any suggestions of what would make the biggest impact.

The pc is mainly used for gaming.

Thanks as allways
Brian.

 

Hi Again,

Going from 4GB to 8GB won't show any real performance increase unless you are a heavy multi-tasker and have many apps open at once.

The best bang for your buck, from a performance perspective, would be to upgrade your video card to something in the ATI 6900 series of cards. By Christmas, these will have come down in price to manageable levels.

 

In all honesty no,you'd have to run multiple top of the line games and programs simultaneously to breach 4gb.when it does happen you will notice the performance drop off as your comp will start to read and write from the page file using your hard drive as memory.This is a totally unnatural situation though that doesn't happen in real world.

Only 64 bit Os's can make use of more than 4gb,Windows 7 tries to make use of every drop of memory if that's your OS and is the best choice for large amounts of memory,where it differs from earlier OS's is unless the memory is demanded it will stay full,so if you call on the program again the memory will not have to be loaded again from the harddrive.

When you first come across this it feels like your computer is faster than God:-D e.g You load a game in the morning,get bored,close the game mess around with some other programs and games and come back later in the day to have the computer load the game almost instantly.If you play multiple games or run multiple large programs through the day this effect can become noticable.

On another note your game's will not run faster or smoother and the levels won't even load any faster other than through the effect just mentioned.My best advice would be to get an SSD rather than memory anyway and run your OS and game from it,everything will work faster straight away including your games but before you do that,trade in your old video card for a new one.

Extra FPS in game is always preferable IMO,as Abekl said.

 

A typo- is the card a 55,56,57,58 or 5970?

memory depends on your OS. I have 3 desktop pc's running Win 7. The 2 running the x86 version both have 4Gb of memory, Windows will use 3.25Gb, just they way x86 memory architecture works. My main rig runs x64 Win 7 and it will use all 8Gb I have installed.

I just installed a 120Gb SSD as my boot drive. This made a big increase in how fast Win7, browsers and a couple games I have on it load. It'll add a little boost to the game play as well.

usually I have an online game, Teamspeak 3 voicechat server & client, web browser and some background stuff all running w/o any issues. I run a Phenom II 3-core @3.2Ghz and have a 5850 1Gb vid card.

sam

 

Aye, a HD 5770.

Thanks