no

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/memory-module-upgrade,review-31549-3.html

same 260 card. tho its ddr3. and faster than ddr2, its pretty much same, its not like you own i7 to need ddr3

from 3gb to 12gb.. 1-2 fps.. if your lucky

I'll go with the 8 gig crowd :-) Extreme multitasking,better loadtimes and future games/programs using it :-)

But if your looking for FPS in a game this is probably not the investment. 

Anyone know how Windows 7 is on memory handling?

Depends on WTHeck your playing.

If you play lots of RTS's then Ignore all the No's in here.

If you play Vanguard You Really want that 8 gigs.

If your playing 99% of the mmo's or FPS's then No there is no need.

Originally posted by Ekibiogami

Depends on WTHeck your playing.

If you play lots of RTS's then Ignore all the No's in here.

If you play Vanguard You Really want that 8 gigs.

If your playing 99% of the mmo's or FPS's then No there is no need.

I played Vanguard with a smooth FPS with 2 gigs, and 4 gigs made hardly any difference at all. Does Vanguard even have a 64 bit exe? If not, then you know automatically that the extra gigs wont matter, because the client wont address them. Now, i currently have 8 gigs of ram, and have seen no increase in performance at all in anything that I do. I have yet to see my memory usage go over 4 gigs under any circumstance. My CPU will max out WAY before my ram will ever be an issue I would assume. It is the same as my quadcore. I have a q9550 OCed to 3.23ghz per core, and it is pretty much useless. Every game I have played, other than GTA4 will only use two cores anyway. Only Prime95 maxes my CPU, and yeah... that is what it is there for, so no surprise.

32 bit executables can only access 2 gb of ram (this is different than the 4gb limit for 32bit OS), so it doesn't really matter what type of game you're playing cuz only a handful of games even have a 64 bit version. Even then they don't get up to 2gb. All that matters is how much ram the apps you're multitasking are using. Most apps don't use a whole lot of memory. My Firefox with 8 tabs open is at 180mb, and I have Chrome with 2 tabs at 40mb.

The only apps that actually use a lot of memory are things like CAD and video editing. Not video encoding - when I encode a video it only uses ~80mb.  8gb is more about influencing paging behavior than actually being used.  At 8gb Vista doesn't feel the need to page the kernel or unused apps in memory out as often, even though it doesn't need to at 4gb either it still would page parts out after long periods of non-use because of its paging behavior.  It prefers to have the ram available for usage before it's needed so it pages out preemptively.  This is what causes apps to get paged to disk after you've been playing a game for a few hours - even if you have enough ram to keep them all loaded at once.

Linux has much more tweakable paging behavior but in Windows you can force the kernel to stay loaded in ram with a registry setting which may help a bit, and you should be able to set your paging file to something very small (like.. 16mb) with 4gb of ram installed which will force most your apps to stay loaded in RAM even if you don't use them for a long time.

I haven't bothered testing it myself because I alt-tab so much nothing gets a chance to get paged but I just set my page file to 16mb and I'll see how it works.  If you are looking specifically for game performance, it's better to spend $40 on 4gb ram and invest $40 more into your video card, than to spend $80 on 8gb of ram.

Originally posted by Rallycart

Originally posted by Ekibiogami

Depends on WTHeck your playing.

If you play lots of RTS's then Ignore all the No's in here.

If you play Vanguard You Really want that 8 gigs.

If your playing 99% of the mmo's or FPS's then No there is no need.

 

I played Vanguard with a smooth FPS with 2 gigs, and 4 gigs made hardly any difference at all. Does Vanguard even have a 64 bit exe? If not, then you know automatically that the extra gigs wont matter, because the client wont address them. Now, i currently have 8 gigs of ram, and have seen no increase in performance at all in anything that I do. I have yet to see my memory usage go over 4 gigs under any circumstance. My CPU will max out WAY before my ram will ever be an issue I would assume. It is the same as my quadcore. I have a q9550 OCed to 3.23ghz per core, and it is pretty much useless. Every game I have played, other than GTA4 will only use two cores anyway. Only Prime95 maxes my CPU, and yeah... that is what it is there for, so no surprise.

Lol you clearly Do not play Vanguard...

and yes Multicores are pointless.

Originally posted by Ekibiogami

Originally posted by Rallycart

Originally posted by Ekibiogami

Depends on WTHeck your playing.

If you play lots of RTS's then Ignore all the No's in here.

If you play Vanguard You Really want that 8 gigs.

If your playing 99% of the mmo's or FPS's then No there is no need.

 

I played Vanguard with a smooth FPS with 2 gigs, and 4 gigs made hardly any difference at all. Does Vanguard even have a 64 bit exe? If not, then you know automatically that the extra gigs wont matter, because the client wont address them. Now, i currently have 8 gigs of ram, and have seen no increase in performance at all in anything that I do. I have yet to see my memory usage go over 4 gigs under any circumstance. My CPU will max out WAY before my ram will ever be an issue I would assume. It is the same as my quadcore. I have a q9550 OCed to 3.23ghz per core, and it is pretty much useless. Every game I have played, other than GTA4 will only use two cores anyway. Only Prime95 maxes my CPU, and yeah... that is what it is there for, so no surprise.

 

Lol you clearly Do not play Vanguard...

and yes Multicores are pointless.

Except.. that Vanguard can't access more than 2 GB of ram.  In all likelyhood it only even draws up to 1.4gb.  We'll say it uses the full 2 GB.  That leaves 2 GB for Vista and whatever else you are running.  Vista, at max, scales itself up to ~850mb (which it wouldn't even use at 4gb or 2gb because it scales back).  So even if you allow Vista 850mb there's 1.2gb left over.  So what do you need 8gb to run Vanguard for?

Even at 2gb of ram what's going to happen is most stuff will get paged out of RAM, so Vanguard will run almost as well at 2gb as 4gb except that there will be more loading off of disk when you open a vendor/load new PC's/enter a new area, but overall FPS is going to be the same, once it's done paging.  So yes you'll avoid some slowdown from loading with 4gb but it's not extremely necessary over 2gb.

Originally posted by noquarter

Originally posted by Ekibiogami

Originally posted by Rallycart

Originally posted by Ekibiogami

Depends on WTHeck your playing.

If you play lots of RTS's then Ignore all the No's in here.

If you play Vanguard You Really want that 8 gigs.

If your playing 99% of the mmo's or FPS's then No there is no need.

 

I played Vanguard with a smooth FPS with 2 gigs, and 4 gigs made hardly any difference at all. Does Vanguard even have a 64 bit exe? If not, then you know automatically that the extra gigs wont matter, because the client wont address them. Now, i currently have 8 gigs of ram, and have seen no increase in performance at all in anything that I do. I have yet to see my memory usage go over 4 gigs under any circumstance. My CPU will max out WAY before my ram will ever be an issue I would assume. It is the same as my quadcore. I have a q9550 OCed to 3.23ghz per core, and it is pretty much useless. Every game I have played, other than GTA4 will only use two cores anyway. Only Prime95 maxes my CPU, and yeah... that is what it is there for, so no surprise.

 

Lol you clearly Do not play Vanguard...

and yes Multicores are pointless.

 

Except.. that Vanguard can't access more than 2 GB of ram.  In all likelyhood it only even draws up to 1.4gb.  We'll say it uses the full 2 GB.  That leaves 2 GB for Vista and whatever else you are running.  Vista, at max, scales itself up to ~850mb (which it wouldn't even use at 4gb or 2gb because it scales back).  So even if you allow Vista 850mb there's 1.2gb left over.  So what do you need 8gb to run Vanguard for?

 

Even at 2gb of ram what's going to happen is most stuff will get paged out of RAM, so Vanguard will run almost as well at 2gb as 4gb except that there will be more loading off of disk when you open a vendor/load new PC's/enter a new area, but overall FPS is going to be the same, once it's done paging.  So yes you'll avoid some slowdown from loading with 4gb but it's not extremely necessary over 2gb.

Ditto, I thought this has been adressed many many times in the past.

-Multi-core require software that are multithreaded to take advantage of them, and games are not multithreaded, the most you will see is engine like Unreal Engine 2.x-3.0 where the audio is offloaded on a second thread. Even then no benchmark will see a difference between 2 or 4 cores.

-Memory, again unless the software has been set to use Large Memory Access, it will stop at 2GB. Now here is something interesting, in theory under vista/windows7 if a game use DX10 under its full extent (very important I'm not talking about a DX9 using DX10 feature sets) it will not shadow a copy of all the textures to your main memory but to the GPU memory only. That is in theory, and it would mean that a game would use even less of your main memory, but as it stands every released  DX10 games are programmed in DX9 with DX10 feature sets so everything has to be shadowed in your main memory as well as your GPU memory (That is why many of those games crash with out of memory under a 32bit Vista w/o Large Memory Accee enabled).

 I recently switched to Vista 64 and bumped my memory up to 8 gig.  I play games windowed and usually have browsers open, music playing, Ventrilo running, etc...so I can hog up memory pretty quick.  Less swapfile access = better.

What's the point of running a 64 bit OS and not use it's ability to address more memory than 3.X gig that 32 bit Windows can address?

Do eeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

Originally posted by Thradar

 I recently switched to Vista 64 and bumped my memory up to 8 gig.  I play games windowed and usually have browsers open, music playing, Ventrilo running, etc...so I can hog up memory pretty quick.  Less swapfile access = better.

What's the point of running a 64 bit OS and not use it's ability to address more memory than 3.X gig that 32 bit Windows can address?

Do eeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

None of those apps use very much memory... I'm playing Lotro as I type this (windowed of course).. 1.4gb.  Firefox with 5 tabs open.. 140mb.  My Vent uses 4 MB. uTorrent is at 11mb.  Digsby 20mb. I use foobar for mp3's which has a very small footprint but I just loaded WMP instead and it says 20mb. Spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc, 38mb.  Hmm, maybe if I play a 14gb 1080p movie? mplayer classic is only using 44mb while playing that - while I'm playing lotro.  I know meGui/handbrake  use about 80mb while encoding video. I can run every one of these apps with 4gb and not have problems.  Now if you realistically can push past 4gb then by all means, but you're gonna need a memory intensive app to do it - the kind of app you wouldn't bother using while playing a game anyway.

The question was: Is 8gb actually worth it?

The answer is: there is nothing I can't do with 4gb that I could with 8gb.  Now if you have the money - do it, it doesn't hurt.  I wouldn't mind 8gb myself just for more breathing room.  But if you are on a budget and trying to allocate cash, spend it on the video card!

Well now that the OP is confused and amused lets cut to the nitty gritty..

If you are using a 32 bit OS anything over 3 gigs is a waste and willnot help performance. For a 64 bit OS 4 gig is the minimum to be useful. Most software will NOT benefit from anything over 4 gig however with RAM prices like they are 8 Gig cannot hurt and will likely help down the road.

Simple answe 8 gig will not see a huge boost in perform,ance but does future proff a bit.

Originally posted by sonicbrew

4 gig is more than sufficient. I am not running Vista (went back to XP) and I run 6 gigs. The problem with XP, Vista, etc.. is that there are not programs pushing and utilizing that much memory currently especially in the gaming aspect that I am aware of. Talk has been going for a few years now about what will or won't utilize that much memory. I could see if you were maybe doing CAD work, design, etc.. there may be some programs pushing the boundaries then.

Unless your getting a killer deal on the memory and its good memory, I would not spend the extra cash on 8 gigs if it were me.

xp maxed out at 4 gig.  if you're running vista, get 8 gig, it does make a bit of difference when you running multiple application like myself.

Yes 8 gigs with Vista is Definitely worth it .. the only ones saying its not are the ones that have only 4 gigs or less.

Sure you can do anything with 4 gigs that you can do with 8, BUT it will be quicker and more responsive with 8 gigs .. and ram has NEVER contributed to higher framerates ..EVER!!!! so upgrading from 2 to 4 or even 8 gigs you will see no increase in framerates( although game play may appear to run smoother with less stuttering due to less file swappage) .. more ram will help you load more at one time and load things quicker .. and lets you switch between open program even faster.

You only think your Vista machine is repsonsive with 4 gigs till you try it with 8 .. once you get 8 gigs, you never wanna go back to 4, I promise you (unless you do it just to argue the point to say you did).

Originally posted by DuClaire

Hi there,

I'm running:

Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit.
XFX 680i SLI MBoard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (3.0ghz)
2x 2gb corsair xms2 pc6400 800mhz memory.

I just upgraded from an 8800GTS OC (640mb) to an nVidia GTX 260. (896mb)

I found a good deal on my memory, question is:

IS IT WORTH UPGRADING FROM 4GB OT 8GB?

Well, everyone is arguing whether you need it or not, lol.  From what I highlighted above, I say go for it.  If it won't set you back financially and it is a good deal... why not?  Just my O

Z

Wow way to cut through all the crap and make a good point :)

Four memory sticks of 2GB each is quite cheap now if you go for the "value" or "no name" type so go for it because eventually you will need 8GB of system memory.

16GB is the max though with the P45 type motherboards and the P43 type only supports 8GB.

No, it's not worth it. For gaming at least unless your OS is so unoptimized with loads of trash running around in memory.

If your OS is optimized and you don't have background apps consuming memory, 8GB is probably not worth the investment.

Some charts:

Originally posted by Zreddna

I'll go with the 8 gig crowd :-) Extreme multitasking,better loadtimes and future games/programs using it :-)

But if your looking for FPS in a game this is probably not the investment. 

Anyone know how Windows 7 is on memory handling?

Win7 uses a bit more mem than XP and a lot less than Vista. Imo this OS is a nice upgrade. I am using Win7 x64 myself best OS i have used in a long time. It is a lot more stable than Vista will probably ever be and it is smooth and fast on my Dell Inspiron 1720 4GBs Ram, Nvidia 8600 GT. A huge improvement (at least on my machine ) over Vista x64.

Originally posted by dendrite

nobody short of image/cad design needs more than 4gb of ram.

What planet do you live on..?

Average computer users can and will use 4gig of memory. And more programs will start to use more memory in the future. Even low end notebokks have 4Gb of memory. Most computer system being sold this Xmas will have 64bit OS (Win7) and at least 4GB+ of ram.

4GB of ram is low end now and the new minimum. Specially with newer 64bit software being developed or every day multi-tasking.

Windows7 itself, can use 700MB.  People who use Design/Cad have 12gig or 24gig of memory. Most new rigs being built using Intel's new platform are all using 6gigs of memory. Which is dirt cheap! Having more ram isn't going to make your machine necessarily faster, but not having enough memory does make your machine slower and sluggish.

Lets face it, 12GB of memory, can be had for $150 bucks..