Please help me with RAM Question...

[LEDAdd1ct]

I have a RAM question for the computer-folks out there.


I am planning out my next system build, and I've already picked out the board. It has two RAM slots, with a max system memory of four gigs. If I buy two one gig sticks (2x1gig = 2 gigs total) I get two gigs of RAM, which will be nice for Windows XP 32-bit, which I intend to run. However, for forty or fifty dollars more, I can get four gigs of RAM, with two two gig sticks (2x2gig = 4 gigs total). Both options allow me to run in dual channel mode. Here's the catch:

x86 systems have issues addressing above 4 gigs of RAM. I would just install Windows XP in the 64-bit flavor, but there have been BIG problems with driver and application compatibility between 32-bit apps and the 64-bit host OS.

If I spend the extra forty bucks on the four gigs of RAM, I future proof myself, so that if I ever decide to switch to a 64-bit OS (which is supported by the Core2Duo CPU I will be using) Windows can address all four gigs. However, I am not quite sure how much my current 32-bit XP will be able to "see" if I purchase the two 2gig sticks. I would rather not use the switch in boot.ini to force Windows to allocate memory differently (for more background info, see these:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Edition )

So what do you guys/gals think? Save the forty bucks and just run the two 1gig sticks, or, should I spend the extra dough, knowing that I am "future-proofing" myself against a possible move to a 64-bit OS, where I *will* be able to take full advantage of the RAM?



LEDAdd1ct

 

[Sub_Umbra]

With $40 at stake I'd go with 4 gigs over two any time.

 

[AlexGT]

Or buy 1 two gig stick and then buy the other when you decide to migrate to another OS, OTOH 40 bucks is not a lot of cash, get the 4 gigs.

 

[rhuck60]

What will be the result of just running 1 of the 2 Gig simms? Its only $40 dollars more for twice as much memory. Then later you can add the 2nd 2 Gig simm.

 

[LEDAdd1ct]

Well, if I ran just one 2gig module, I would not get the advantage of running things in a dual channel configuration. I was thinking of picking one of these two up:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211188



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211066

 

[ValhallaPrime]

Hey hey.....

interesting dilemma.....Also, not to be nitpicky, but I followed your "Egg" links....Adata stuff is "ok", but traditionally you can't push their stuff too hard, as in OCing. At least the stuff i've seen over the years. I'm in bed with Crucial and Corsair....even their Value Series stuff has been great....and I buy about 50-200 sticks a year of the stuff at my workplace, and use Corsair exclusively at home. Not the premium stuff, just their vanilla sticks. Works great.

If you're thinking about future-proofing....hmmm.....Not sure what C2Duo you're looking at, but have you thought about the cheaper C2Quads and maybe OCing them up a bit. People are getting great results. Unless you're doing a lot of 3D modelling or Video work, you're not really gonna feel the cores immediately, but more and more apps will be threading beyond 2 pretty soon. That would be a good long-term build, and then down the road you could throw more sticks in if you need.

I've got an Athlon X2 2.0 cranked to dual 2.7 right now, but she's only AGP....gonna probably build a Quadfather rig in February...

With 2 gigs onboard right now, the most total ram usage on my X2 2.7 box is with COD4 and Crysis, and even then, it's not push more than 1.4gigs total system usage, with the games pulling about 1.1 of the sysmem. My roomate as 4 gigs on his box....he's a professional Maya and 3dStudioMax modeller, and he's never pulling more than about 2GB of ram total from that. He's on XP pro tho, not Veeesta. He's said that complex afterEffects stuff tends to creep up on the RAM usage tho.

One more thing....no need to future-proof by buying more RAM now....You can always buy some when you need it down the road, and use the $40 on some 123's for me. just a thought.

 

[cerbie]

Not OCing? Get the A-Data 4GB kit. I'm finally down to mine only costing $190 (rebate check came in). And, heh, I was excited about how cheap it was then.

If you must question how much ram to get, the answer is always the higher amount. Over 4GB is not a good idea for XP 32-bit, though.

I can use 3GB with Thunderbird and Firefox. You know what's awesome, though? 0MB in the swap partition. Big fat zero. Can you say, "snappy"? I have 3.6GB of the 4GB to use, with a 256MB video card.

2GB handling your games? 4GB will handle the games, and your web browser (with a hundred different tabs open), and media player, and mail client, and IM client, all at the same time, without HDD thrashing.

Also, in case you don't know, Intel has some new C2D CPUs coming out in Jan/Feb, that will be a little faster, undervolt and overclock better, and use a bit less power out of the box, for a bit cheaper than the current ones. Usually, it's bad to wait, but if you don't need this PC very very quickly, they will be worth waiting on.

 

[flashy bazook]

Well, first of all even a Win 64 will run in 2 Gigs, so you don't need 4 Gigs to "futureproof" anything. I've been running Win 64 Pro with 2 Gigs with no problems. If you need the 4 Gigs it's because of some apps you are running. Since you don't need the 4 Gigs right away, it means you are not really running apps that need them.

Then, I don't think there are BIG problems with interoperability of 32 bit and 64 bit "drivers" and "applications" as you say. There have been issues between not having the needed drivers and HARDWARE driven by the drivers. I've been running a 64 bit Win for a year and a half now and I've been running both types of apps (both 32- and 64-bit) together with no problems.

Then, I disagree with some other posters who say no prob upgrading later. There is no technical problem, but if you have 2x1Gig sticks and later you buy 2x2 Gig sticks (which is how your mobo is configured to get the 4 Gig capacity) you basically throw out the 2x1 Gig sticks and lose money!

So if you think you will need for some good reason (basically, apps related) the 4 Gigs, in the long run you will save a bit of money by getting it right away and not spending extra money on the 2x1 Gig.

 

[jtr1962]

Go with 4GB now. RAM is so cheap it's a no brainer. If you were to go with 2GB now, chances are good it might be more expensive when you need to upgrade. I say when because there were already two times I put what I thought was an excessive amount of RAM in my machines. First time was 128MB in a Pentium, second time was 1GB in a PII. Both times I eventually not only used the RAM, but wished the motherboard supported more. My XP3200 system is currently maxed out at 3GB. I haven't needed even 2GB yet, but the RAM wasn't horribly expensive.

I'm building a system for my brother now. Even though he has no need for over perhaps 1GB now, I'm putting in 4GB. I also purposely bought a motherboard with four RAM slots so I can add more later should it be needed. Since I'm using XP there's no point in getting more than 4GB since it can't use anything over that. Down the road we have the possibility of upgrading to Vista and installing up to 16GB in that motherboard. Somehow I doubt we'll ever need to. It seems RAM is finally reaching the point that hard disks reached a few years ago-namely becoming larger faster than most people's needs.

 

[mechBgon]

Another vote for 4GB. Having played the Crysis single-player demo and seeing it pretty much dominate my present system with just 2GB, it would make sense to get 4GB for the future, even if you'll only be able to get at 3.25-3.5GB of it with 32-bit Windows. For just $40, "no-brainer" is definitely the right word :twothumbs

If you decide to get 64-bit Windows, I wouldn't recommend XP Pro x64 Edition. It's a dead end, and only available in an OEM variant too. Make it Vista x64, is my advice. some version info and stuff

 

[AMD64Blondie]

I'd say go with OCZ memory. I'm running 2 1GB sticks of OCZ XTC Platinum DDR2 800,and they've been working flawlessly.(rest of specs: AMD Phenom 9500,Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4,and nearly 2TB of various hard drives-Hitachi,Western Digital,and Maxtor.)

 

[LEDAdd1ct]

...some awesome information here. I will try and respond to the different points.

1) The Motherboard Issue with Respect to Maximum RAM Slots

The motherboard I am looking at has two slots, and accommodates a maximum of four gigs of RAM. Therefore, I only get two slots, unless, of course, I elect to purchase a more expensive board which has four slots. A four slot board would probably accommodate up to eight gigs. However, this would increase the price.

2) The Reason I Might Need Four or More Gigs

a) I realize that most of my applications probably won't call for nearly that much RAM. However, I may run some legacy OS on virtual machines, which would definitely eat up that much memory.


b) I like running Live CDs, and my favorite thing to do with Live CDs is run them all in RAM, which makes them unbelievably fast and responsive. That takes a lot of memory.

Here is the board I am thinking about getting:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16813121323

I believe is has *real* IDE, which is important to me. That is, the IDE controller is built into the chipset, and is *not* some third-party afterthought.

3) Overclocking

I don't do it and I don't intend to. So, I am sure the A-Data RAM will be fine.

4) Price-drops

I am not in a hurry to build this system, and will be waiting at least until February of 2008 to see what price-drops Intel has in store on their CPUs.

 

[gadget_lover]

I recently upgraded to a 3ghz AMD x2 and run Linux on it. WIth 64 bit binaries and 4 GB of ram it's quite responsive. I am not a power user. It's loafing along in power saving mode ( both cores at 1ghz) and it's barely using any resources. Load average is .19 with 166 programs running. I have 4 G of swap, 0 is in use.

I'd recommend a MB with 4 slots and/or able to handle higher capacity memory. Mine has 4 slots and can do 32 GB. I will (probably) never use that much, but my last system lasted almost 10 years, so who knows.

BTW, the live CDs run really well with this setup.


Daniel

 

[jtr1962]

I'd recommend a MB with 4 slots and/or able to handle higher capacity memory. Mine has 4 slots and can do 32 GB. I will (probably) never use that much, but my last system lasted almost 10 years, so who knows.

I'll second that. With almost every motherboard supporting at least 2GB per slot, four slots give you the option of starting out with 4GB now, and having two slots left over. Down the road when more RAM is needed 4GB DIMMs should be mainstream, allowing up to 8GB more RAM to be added without discarding the RAM you already purchased.

Is it just me or is the current situation deja vu? I remember back around 1990 we started going from 16 to 32 bit motherboards. Soon, you had motherboards which could take 8, 16, or 32 MB of RAM. Just swap GB for MB, 32 bit for 64 bit, and it looks like something similar all over again.

So I guess 10-15 years down the road motherboards supporting 1TB will be common? I doubt we'll ever need to go from 64 to 128 bit any time soon, though. 64-bit = 16 exabytes ( 10^18). Even if current trends continue unabated it would be a good 50 years before we get there.

 

[mechBgon]

I believe is has *real* IDE, which is important to me. That is, the IDE controller is built into the chipset, and is *not* some third-party afterthought.

The block diagram in Intel's manual for that motherboard shows that the IDE controller is native to the ICH7, yeah. So that's good.

 

[mechBgon]

Incidentally, if you can give up the native IDE requirement, there's an Intel full-sized ATX board with four RAM slots, onboard video and onboard Firewire:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121048

For better or for worse, IDE is going away eventually. If you picked this board, you'd have onboard video to get started with, Firewire, more expansion slots and more RAM slots.

 

[jumpstat]

40$ ? Get the 2x2gigs....more the merrier!!

 

[flashy bazook]

So, what kinds of CD-based apps benefit from running as a live-CD?

I wonder because even games supposedly are installed on the HD, and you really are using the CD in the CD-slot as a kind of check that you have a legitimate copy.

And many apps are just downloads these days anyway.

So what's left over that still comes as a CD and benefits from running as a live-CD?

 

[gadget_lover]

Live CD:

I have a company laptop that I sometimes take with me. When I want to surf the web I don't want to have to use the company VLAN and such. I boot off a live CD and when I shut down the system it all goes away, leaving the laptop pristine.

A live CD is also an interesting way to check out the new Linux distros without committing to them.

Daniel

 

[LEDAdd1ct]

Incidentally, if you can give up the native IDE requirement, there's an Intel full-sized ATX board with four RAM slots, onboard video and onboard Firewire:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121048

For better or for worse, IDE is going away eventually. If you picked this board, you'd have onboard video to get started with, Firewire, more expansion slots and more RAM slots.

At first glance, it does look nice. But if you pop on over to the CPU compatibility page, things look a lot less rosy:

http://processormatch.intel.com/CompDB/SearchResult.aspx?Boardname=dg965ry

vs. the board I posted before:

http://processormatch.intel.com/CompDB/SearchResult.aspx?Boardname=dg31pr

Although the one with more RAM and Firewire looks good at first glance, I don't know if I would want the headache of wondering if the expensive CPU I just bought will work or not.

I think I am probably going to purchase a pair of Kingston chips as seen here:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134193

I know they run at 1.8v solid because I've done the research on those before, and for the price and the reputation......

But I think I agree with most people here- it is better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, with respect to the four gigs of RAM.