4 gigs of ram?

[Alan00000]

I want to know if 4 gigs is over kill.
Here is what i have now. 2 gigs of this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211066

would getting an extra 2 gigs be a waste of money?
Mainly for DX10 games that are coming out soon.
Its only $87 then there is a rebate on top of that.

 

[Asus]

Good value being at $87 but if you won't make use of it all then there is good potential for a performance loss.

I would check how your board will react with 4 sticks of that memory. Most would bump the 1T latency setting to 2T with 4 large sticks which makes a noticeable impact for the worse. And unless you are running out of memory then the 2GB extra space you gained would go unused and there would be no performance gain to offset the latency penalty.
Old example but still matters. P4 setup used all 512MB sticks. 4 sticks for 2GB and 2 for 1GB setups. Read the comments too. (lower score the better)

If I were you I would wait until you know you use more than 2GB of memory with the games/applications you run and buy 2 sticks @ 2GB each.

 

[giant384]

if your running vista then 2gigs is enough for now to run it just fine

 

[WhiteZero]

Plus you'd need to be running a 64bit OS in order to use it all.

 

[giant384]

Plus you'd need to be running a 64bit OS in order to use it all.

umm it thought vista supported up to 16gbs of ram.....thats just in 64bit which barely anyone uses???

 

[[RnL]Stefan]

umm it thought vista supported up to 16gbs of ram.....thats just in 64bit which barely anyone uses???

depends on the version.

everything above 4 gigs (3-25 - 3.5 actually) needs 64bit. Vista ultimate 64 supports 128 gigs even.

I am running with 2 gigs and I am fine currently. going to upgrade once crysis hits the shelfes i think.

 

[SAJ]

Don't forget that your video-ram counts towards your total, in regards to the 4gb upper limit.

 

[gweedodogg69]

Some boards act funny with 4GB. There is an Asus board we put into a server here and the 4GB would only show up as 3GB due to chipset limits or w/e. Kind of a waste of money, but read the manual for the board and make sure it will actually use 4GB.

 

[ricera10]

Don't forget that your video-ram counts towards your total, in regards to the 4gb upper limit.

That made me lol at people with SLI'd 8800 GTX's...

 

[NeptuneUK]

If you have windows vista go for it tbh

if your running vista then 2gigs is enough for now to run it just fine

Vista can use more than double the ram of XP, which games don't like.
Actually though, it would be best to stick to 2x2gb stick as opposed to 4x1gb ones because if you arent already maxing out your ram then you may notice a negative impact on performance. Unless of course quad channel has been invented since 2 years ago when I actually cared about PC hardware and kept up to date.

 

[Asus]

I've read for Vista 64bit that a lot of times you have to modify the executable for the game if it doesn't automatically detect that it can go beyond 2GB virtual memory limit for applications.

 

[Gray Fox]

Don't forget that your video-ram counts towards your total, in regards to the 4gb upper limit.

Wait is true.

 

[ricera10]

Yeah, it is true. I'm too lazy to dig up links, but if you google some stuff about the Intel 945 chipset memory limitation, you're bound to find all sorts of stuff on this.