Ok, now I'm confused. I'm getting a 8800gtx graphics card with 768 mb of ram. If I were to get the 4 gigs or ram, I would be able to use around 3.232 gigs? Would it drop further if I went to SLI(768 mb video ram times 2)?
-----Original Message----- From: Jim Davis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 27, 2007 5:19 PM To: CF-Community Subject: SPAM-LOW: RE: memory timing > -----Original Message----- > From: Vivec [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, August 27, 2007 4:39 PM > To: CF-Community > Subject: Re: memory timing > > If you are not using a 64 Bit OS (and if you are interested in gaming > you shouldn't be) , then 4gig is overkill. Games don't use 4Gig. > Nothing does actually, so a large portion of that memory will never be > used. > > 32Bit Vista or XP cannot address a full 4Gig of memory. There's all > sorts of complicated reasons why, some people end up with 2.5Gig being > available to the OS. You can't even think of using the remainder for a > RAM drive (remember those? ) as most games are bigger than such a > drive anyway.(Why not just use a USB stick?). > > So think hard on whether you want that extra 2Gigs. I don't think you could go wrong with that advice - a few comments tho': 32bit Vista and XP CAN address a full four gig: but not all that memory is RAM. Essentially they'll address a tiny bit of system memory and then all your video card memory and THEN your RAM. In my case I have four Gig of RAM and a 512 Meg video card - so I get a little under 3.5 Gig of RAM. Basically it ends up being 4 Gig minus Video RAM as your total addressable RAM. Some games do in fact benefit a bit but not enough to notice. Mostly in load times for games that stream from the disk, not so much in actual performance. The main thing is that very few games are memory bound at that level - before you see any real benefits from more memory you need to first had headroom on the CPU or GPU - and it's not like that happens a lot. ;^) But, finally, it also depends on your mobo configuration and the number of chips. The reason I have four gig is because of a mistake. My system is a dual Opteron system. There are six RAM slots: four dedicated to the first CPU and two dedicated to the second. The system works best when each CPU has dedicated RAM. In addition the memory bus is fastest with two chips in parallel (dual channel) and is much faster accessing it own memory rather than shared memory - the whole mess is called "NUMA" (non-uniform memory access). The long and short of it is that you really need four RAM chips to make this board sing. In my case I made a mistake. I bought two 1 Gig chips and (board limitation) needed to put them in the first procs banks - this made operations on the second proc slower (since it's accessing shared memory). Still much (MUCH) faster than one proc, but not nearly as fast as it could be. Later I was able to afford two more Gig for the second proc which sped things up considerably. Had I the chance to do it over again I probably would have stuck with two Gig of RAM - but as four 512 Meg chips. Still Four gig (or, in my case 3.5 usable Gig) does make a difference... running Eclipse, CorelDraw, Photo-Paint, Word and Visio simultaneously is noticably more peppy. ;^) So the unfortunately confusing bottom line is that the processor(s), motherboard and video card(s) you're planning to pair the memory with can all affect your decision. Jim Davis ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Download the latest ColdFusion 8 utilities including Report Builder, plug-ins for Eclipse and Dreamweaver updates. http;//www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs%5adobecf8%5Fbeta Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:241409 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5
