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connnnn · 13-09-2007, 12:41 AM

You have to consider that buying faster RAM might give better results than buying MORE RAM (i.e. 4 gigs of DDR2-800 vs 2 gigs of DDR3).

No games are made presuming 4 gigs of system RAM, and none will until 64bit computing is more common. There is a very specific reason for this. It's the same reason someone from Epic (I'm not sure but I think it was Tim Sweeney) recently said that nobody is really making games for video cards with more than 512mb onboard RAM. I won't get into it, but there's a pretty good article about it here:

32 bit memory addressing limit explained

In short: if you have a 32bit OS, more than 3gb of RAM is most likely totally useless to you because your system simply can't use it (well, essentially...). And the more RAM your video card has, the less system RAM you're able to squeeze into the limit. This is why most people are going with faster 2gb ram sets instead of worrying about adding more. I haven't seen any benchmarks in XP to compare 2gb vs 3gb of current-gen RAM so I'm not sure how that compares.

13-09-2007, 12:41 AM	#41 (permalink)
connnnn Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: TX, USA Posts: 425	Re: How Good PC Do I Need? You have to consider that buying faster RAM might give better results than buying MORE RAM (i.e. 4 gigs of DDR2-800 vs 2 gigs of DDR3). No games are made presuming 4 gigs of system RAM, and none will until 64bit computing is more common. There is a very specific reason for this. It's the same reason someone from Epic (I'm not sure but I think it was Tim Sweeney) recently said that nobody is really making games for video cards with more than 512mb onboard RAM. I won't get into it, but there's a pretty good article about it here: 32 bit memory addressing limit explained In short: if you have a 32bit OS, more than 3gb of RAM is most likely totally useless to you because your system simply can't use it (well, essentially...). And the more RAM your video card has, the less system RAM you're able to squeeze into the limit. This is why most people are going with faster 2gb ram sets instead of worrying about adding more. I haven't seen any benchmarks in XP to compare 2gb vs 3gb of current-gen RAM so I'm not sure how that compares.