i just got 128 mg of pc100 at office depot for like $13. on sale for 18 and a 5 rebate. i know, it is a stupid thing to get excited over. but that just kills me.

I've got a PII 350 w/96MB of RAM. Most games run like ass if I turn everything up full blast. If I load it up w/384MB of RAM in conjunction with my 32MB TNT2 AGP card, will games run faster/better, or is it still heavily dependent upon the processor?

TIA!

What games are you running, and what OS are you running?

I would say you should add 128 MB of RAM and see what happens -- it's so cheap there is NO excuse not to.

But your video card is VERY slow compared to today's cards (2 years is an absolute eternity... the GeForce 3 Ti 500 is at least 10x faster than your card), and a P2 350 is pretty stale too (almost 4 years old, heh).

If you're playing Quake 3 or something, it's time for a new computer, unless you wanna run at 800x600.

The extra RAM will really matter if you have a few apps open at the same time and the OS must page. If you only run ONE app at a time (the game) you may not page if you're in 95/98. You will page in NT/2000/XP with that little RAM.

All new systems these days should go with 256 or 512 MB, minumum.

-B

it was too cheap not to do it. Unfortunately, I've only got three DIMM slots, I if I want to go any higher I have to start getting rid of existing ram (256, 256, 528)

But it has gone up to around $30 now.

Gotta love getting 1GB of RAM for $150

Though it has come down a lot, too.

I just added 512 MB to my desktop machine, for $260. About 8X what SDRAM costs but whatareyagonnado? I hear Intel is abandoning Rambus for some future mobos, which is good.

-B

though perhaps throughput is greater... I dunno, I'm not that well versed in the nuances of memory architecture. But some geeks like to bitch about it.

-B

All benchmarks I have seen, show RDRAM a little faster, than DDR and SDR, but not enough to warrant the price difference. It was designed around the Pentium 4, and that's were it has a slight edge.

Note that the 845 supports SDRAM on P4 ;)

Chipsets 815 and 820 were NOT designed for a Pentium 4. Like I said, RDRAM was designed around a P4, and will outperform SD and DDR(New DDR compatible chipset is available from Intel starting this week). ie 850chipset is faster than any 845 chipset with same processor.
The difference is not enough to warrant the costs, but RDRAM is still the TOP performer for a P4.

PII/350... used to have a tough time with most games. I then bought 128mb of ram and a 32mb TNT2 card, and ane sound card (it would hang whenever the sounds got out of control). It ran like butter after that. Now it run like **** again because I have a 15gb hard drive with 15mb free space. (I have a little counter in my newsgroup software as to how much I've downloaded... 147 GB!!!!... that means my hard drive has been filled 10 consecutive times LOL)

RDRAM is the highest performer in certain tests if you have two parallel banks of the most expensive RDRAM available.

Oh wait, but they are testing a SINGLE bank of DDR to a parallel banks of RDRAM. Want to guess what happens if you compare two banks of RDRAM to a two-banked DDR setup like N-Force?

You don't want to know. RDRAM is dead.

<ul><li><a href="http://www.crucial.com">Crucial Memory -- MaD SaViNgS aNd SeLeCtIoN Yo!!!</a></li></ul>

It really depends on the game, and your resolution settings.

I have a 1.4Ghz Athlon with a 64MB GeForce2 GTS card. On games like Max Payne and Flight Simulator, if I'm running with full anti-aliasing and 1024 X 768 true color, my CPU utilization is non-stop between 92-98%. Yes, most heavy-duty 3D games are heavily dependent on the CPU.

I have to disagree with DRoss on this one. I would say that the CPU and graphics card each take about 50% of the load on newer games. The RAM and hard drive speed have an impact, but not nearly as much.

If you only add that extra RAM to your system, you really won't see that much of an improvement.

Most expensive RDRAM? I am assuming you mean PC800, which is the standard today? I mean DDR has different speed too....100,133 etc.

N-Force? Is that a Pentium 4 chipset? And more impostantly is it out yet? I mean a year from now there will be something better out there. It's hard to come out with a product a year later, and expect to sell it with lower performance stats.

I could care less of RDRAM is dead or not. I don't have any stock in Rambus. I was just relaying my experiences. Take them as mine, and mine alone.

And yes, DDR has two speeds, but they aren't 100 or 133, they are PC1600 and PC2100. It the names are all but arbitrary and were an attempt to one up the PC600,PC700,PC800 names of RDRAM.

Actually, no the N-Force chipset isn't a P4 chipset, it is an Athlon one. So marks there. But that doesn't relate as to which memory is actually faster. Head to head DDR wins when you compare equal setups.

That's what I speak of when you say the 850 is so much faster than everything else. This is solely because it supports two simultaneous channels of RDRAM. Thats it's big gig. Well, DDR has this now too, and so the 850 loses its big advantage there. That was my main point, that you spoke of the vast advantage of 850 and I was pointing out that there is competition for it now.

Your point about which setups are actually available is well taken though. Still, Athlon has taken root largely because P4 RDRAM cost too much. Without the RDRAM trap Intel was in Intel never would have had to worry about Athlon. Athlon would have been a non-starter.

makes me think if i ever buy a new computer i won't pay the Mfg'rs premium on RAM, but go to crucial.com afterwards and get it at a savings.

i've done RAM upgrades from crucial on 2 PC's and 1 notebook in the last 6 months and i am satisfied with quality and service.

i even flucked up my 1st order and they waived the restocking fee for me - now that is nice.

I guess we do agree on something....LOL

I mentioned on my first post that the advantage of RDRAM was in the 850 chipset, because it was designed for that. For the P4, the fastest thing out there IS RDRAM, right? Even with intel newesr DDR chipset.

The guys at RamBus would be very annoyed to hear that as their technology predates PIII even.

Steve pretty well covers the arguments about why the 850 is faster than the 845, let me add that ServerWorks does some awesome stuff with SDRAM and the P4.

The point is that a good memory controller architecture is a good memory controller architecture. The gains in a memory technology are much smaller than those in the controller. Hell, we were wringing SDRAM performance out of plain ole FPDRAM back in the days of graphics, just cause our interface designer knew his sh!t.

To say that RDRAM is "best" is too simplistic, and your own arguments about Intel occasionally having top performance with their RDRAM memory controller only support the point.

In fact, since SDRAM costs less (a LOT less) it's much cheaper to build a higher performing memory system with it, since the user won't gripe about (for example) 4 banks of 256MB SDRAM if it costs him less than one of RDRAM!

Needed 8 of the 16KBx1 DRAM DIPs to get a whole 16KB at $128. Makes your 1MB (not that you could have put it in anything) &gt;$8000.... Probably 1980-1982 sometime.

But then I don't want to void the warrenty on the first day I get it, plus I should go through a break in period.. Warm her up a couple of times, get the chip spooling...

Since RDRAM can burst more than DDR SDRAM can and since it has a higher latency, the P4 was designed with aggressive prefetching.

The prefetching helps with the increased latency, and the extra bandwidth doesn't make the prefetching eat away at performance as noticably in the case it miss guesses.