General Discussion

Thought some might find this interesting:

Who would have guessed?

The memory selling company that goes under the well known name of Corsair, has made an interesting PDF document in which they explain why 4GB of memory is better than 2GB. This comes from a company that is actually living off the sales of its memory, but nevertheless this document does cover some interesting facts.

On these full 13 pages of this PDF document called "gaming performance analysis - 4GB vs 2GB", Corsair explains about memory usage with 32 and 64bit operating systems, tests the task switching and most importantly, the games. To be precise Corsair decided to try Company of Heroes, Crysis and Flight Sim X.

Yet another interesting part is the testbed choice, as Corsair decided to go for Asus ROG P965 motherboard. The rest of the specs includes Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650, 320MB Geforce 8800GTS and 512MB 8800GT and 2/4GB of Corsair XMS2 memory.

In the conclusion, Corsair states that 4GB has become an essential choice for gamers. We like to say, not just gamers, with the Vista OS, 2GB is something that you must have and 4GB is something that 2GB were on the good old XP. As the price of the DDR2 memory is so low, getting 4GB of memory wouldn't be a costly option.

You can check out Corsair's test report here.


 

    Wow and all this time i thought 2GB of RAM out performed 4GB. Who woulda thunk it!...

Um. . . duh?

Originally posted by XImpalerX

    Wow and all this time i thought 2GB of RAM out performed 4GB. Who woulda thunk it!...

It can depending on how it's loaded.  For example, 4x 1 gig sticks should be slightly faster than 2x 2gig sticks.

It all depends on the quality of the RAM as well. OCZ has always been my RAM of choice since overclocking them is easy and they stay cool.

Since Vista caches all of the frequently used applications in your RAM, it can use over 1gb at all times. I have attempted to find some registry changes to give it a fixed amount, but apparently they don't let you. So, 4gb dual channel is indeed the way to go. 2gb kits would be okay for WoW, but AoC... you need at least 3gb since medium settings take up 1.9gb of memory upon entering the game. This inludes the cached RAM Vista already had allocated.

hmmm nice corsair that question has always been burning in the back of my mind...

Originally posted by tempestormer

It all depends on the quality of the RAM as well. OCZ has always been my RAM of choice since overclocking them is easy and they stay cool.

Since Vista caches all of the frequently used applications in your RAM, it can use over 1gb at all times. I have attempted to find some registry changes to give it a fixed amount, but apparently they don't let you. So, 4gb dual channel is indeed the way to go. 2gb kits would be okay for WoW, but AoC... you need at least 3gb since medium settings take up 1.9gb of memory upon entering the game. This inludes the cached RAM Vista already had allocated.

quality orf ram and speed of it definitely has an effect, but for games like Age of Conan the simple effect of having 4 GB over 2Gb will do much more for performance than having 2gb standard ram compared to 2gb extra fast ram. (even slow ram is hundrets times faster than your computer swapping to harddisk)

Originally posted by quaiky

 

Originally posted by tempestormer

It all depends on the quality of the RAM as well. OCZ has always been my RAM of choice since overclocking them is easy and they stay cool.

Since Vista caches all of the frequently used applications in your RAM, it can use over 1gb at all times. I have attempted to find some registry changes to give it a fixed amount, but apparently they don't let you. So, 4gb dual channel is indeed the way to go. 2gb kits would be okay for WoW, but AoC... you need at least 3gb since medium settings take up 1.9gb of memory upon entering the game. This inludes the cached RAM Vista already had allocated.

 

quality orf ram and speed of it definitely has an effect, but for games like Age of Conan the simple effect of having 4 GB over 2Gb will do much more for performance than having 2gb standard ram compared to 2gb extra fast ram. (even slow ram is hundrets times faster than your computer swapping to harddisk)

Correct, if Conan ever had to rely on your HDD, then it's time for more memory. Most people are going to feel the wrath of this if they plan on playing the game with only 2gb kits. But in retrospect, a high performance 4gb kit would technically "out perform" a crappy 4gb kit.

AoC runs just fine on 2gb of ram if your using XP.  If your running vista, then 4gb would be the min due to the resource hogging. 

On paper, 4gb will always be better than 2gb when it comes to resources.  If you never run out of physical memory while gaming, then your fine.  If you do, or the game has intensive memory leaks that crash you before your gaming session is supposed to end, then more ram again is beneficial.

Aside from a memory leak over MANY hours in a single session, I havent encountered a single game that runs out of memory before I quit.  Be it mmorpg or FPS.  Course I run a clean system, very few processes, and overall got good ram. 

For 4gb, I often prefer 4x1gb sticks on a non OC rig.  If I plan to oc the rig then 2x2gb sticks is easier on the northbridge.  Also, there is less ratio of failures due to less sticks and troubleshooting is overall faster.