The RAM and XP question

[frogbeastegg]

Is there any point to having 4GB of RAM if you have 32bit windows XP?

I'm somewhat sceptical. Currently I have 2GB of very good RAM, plus a video card with 640MB of memory. I'm wondering about upping it to 4GB for the sake of Civ 5 and a few others; RAM is cheap at the moment and I could get some sticks which match my existing corsair stuff so there wouldn't be any performance gaps between the old and the new. Combined with a bit of overclocking on my E6600 core2duo it should give my system a decent boost. Or so I am gently musing.

But there's the limit on 2GB per program, and there's also the way video RAM is supposed to be counted in with standard RAM for that limit. If I added more my games wouldn't be able to use much of it, would they? They'd only gain back the relatively small fraction used by windows. Surely not worth the money?

I'm not going to switch to a different version of windows.

[Beskar]

RAM is so cheap now-a-days, and it is a significant upgrade over your current. You would only be looking at around £30 for two sticks of 2gig each (total of 4) possibly even get it for less depending on your personal circumstances and in my opinion, it makes a very clear and noticeable difference.

With my current budget and situation, paying the amount for the RAM will not be breaking any banks, however, I don't know about your situation and if money is very tight, then it might be best skipping it.

The best way to think about it would be like this. "If I simply lost £30 at this moment, how negative an impact will it have on my life?".

I would recommend assuming the worst case, then deciding on that. If it ends up better then that, you will feel really good about it.

[LeftEyeNine]

Upgrade, frog. You may go for x64 someday later. Until then, an extra 1GB would relieve the bottlenecking.

[Lemur]

Like LEN said, you should see an extra gig, which will make a difference. As for shared video memory, that only applies to certain crippled motherboard-based GPUs. If you have an actual videocard, its gig (or half-gig or whatever) of RAM does not count against the 2.5 gig–3 gig limit in XP.

[Beskar]

I thought the limit was 3.5 with the last 0.5 being the Windows stuff moved from the harddrive virtual memory and onto the ram. (Which would speed windows and your harddrive speed)

[drone]

I think it's ~3.2 Gb (XP SP2 and later), the rest is taken for addressing PCI cards and devices.

[frogbeastegg]

It'd be more like £50-£60 to get 2GB of RAM that matches what I've got; moving to 4GB of the kind of RAM which costs £30ish would be something of a sidestep and likely wouldn't help that much. I've got corsair XMS6400 800Mhz DDR2 at the moment, and at the time of buying that was one step below their uber high end Dominator sticks. That still seems to be the case; it's still being made and the timings etc are all still very high on the scale. That's how I've managed so well with 2GB; smaller and faster can beat larger and slower.

I can afford to do that. I won't be happy doing it unless there's a real difference; I'd prefer to spend the money on something else or save it for a rainy day if the difference is only going to be minor.

I've got an 8800 GTS, not the king of cards like it used to be but still more than capable of running most things at high settings. I feel that with Civ 5 and a few other forthcoming games I have some interest in it's my CPU and RAM that are beginning to hold things back. A bit of looking around shows that the E6600 is great for overclocking so I can probably boost that from 2.4 up to something like 2.8-3.0 without needing additional cooling etc.

[Xiahou]

Like LEN said, you should see an extra gig, which will make a difference. As for shared video memory, that only applies to certain crippled motherboard-based GPUs. If you have an actual videocard, its gig (or half-gig or whatever) of RAM does not count against the 2.5 gig–3 gig limit in XP.

Actually, your video memory still has to be addressed. Meaning it probably will take yet another bite out of your 4GB maximum.

This is from an HP whitepaper:

The largest block of addresses is allocated for today’s high performance graphics cards which need addresses for at least the amount of memory on the graphics card. The net result is that a high performance x86-based computer may allocate 512 MB to more than 1 GB for the PCI memory address range before any RAM (physical user memory) addresses are allocated.

Froggy, if you're lucky, you'll see 3GB at the most if you install 4GB. Personally, I don't think 4gigs of RAM on a 32bit system is that good an investment. I guess if you have no plans of any future upgrades and want to squeeze everything you possibly can out of your current system, go for it. But I wouldn't expect any big performance gains.

[Beskar]

It'd be more like £50-£60 to get 2GB of RAM that matches what I've got; moving to 4GB of the kind of RAM which costs £30ish would be something of a sidestep and likely wouldn't help that much. I've got corsair XMS6400 800Mhz DDR2 at the moment, and at the time of buying that was one step below their uber high end Dominator sticks. That still seems to be the case; it's still being made and the timings etc are all still very high on the scale. That's how I've managed so well with 2GB; smaller and faster can beat larger and slower.

Alright, I been looking around, my usual supplier has a problem with the fact they all moved over to DDR3, hence you can get better DDR3 prices then DDR2, but even then, 2GB is still around £30-40 which seems to match what you got.

The closest they have to yours (make and stat wise):
Corsair XMS2 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 6400C5 TwinX Dual Channel (TWIN2X4096-6400C5C) 800Mhz is £82.24

But even then, you can get:
Kingston HyperX 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel (KHX8500D2K2/4G) for £75

Which is better and cheaper.

So it really depends on your supplier, but if you are looking at £50-60, you are getting ripped off. Though, I don't recommend looking at DDR3 prices, they will make you cry at how cheap that is.

Corsair XMS3 6GB 2GB DDR3 16000C9 2000MHz Triple-channel is only £45

[Lemur]

Here's a dumb question: Why not migrate the machine over the Windows 7 64-bit and use all the RAM you like? I know, Win7 is pricey off the rack, but surely you can access a student package, or talk to your geek friends and see who has an extra license. Heck, I know a guy who just dropped three licenses he wasn't using on another friend. You just have to get hooked up.

Yes, Windows Vista was painful, but 7 makes up for all of that. It really is a lovely OS. Go ahead, make the move.

[frogbeastegg]

Froggy, if you're lucky, you'll see 3GB at the most if you install 4GB. Personally, I don't think 4gigs of RAM on a 32bit system is that good an investment. I guess if you have no plans of any future upgrades and want to squeeze everything you possibly can out of your current system, go for it. But I wouldn't expect any big performance gains.

I can neither justify or afford a big upgrade. I'm looking for a smaller, cheaper way to give the machine a bit more oomph and keep it a solid gaming machine for another year or so. It's mainly for civ 5 and a couple of forthcoming games; I'm slipping towards the middleground between recommended and minimum in memory and CPU.

CPU, er not keen. It's a more expensive option, it's a harder DIY upgrade and I don't want to get involved, and it doesn't seem like moving to a faster core2duo or a quadcore would really give that much oomph in return for the cost and pain. Plus my current CPU is meant to be great for overclocking so I can get extra power without spending.

RAM. Cheap, easy, a doddle to fit, would relieve the main bottleneck. There's the 32bit memory limit which makes it a less straightforward move than it otherwise would be.

I hoped a combo of extra memory and some overclocking would provide a decent bit of oopmh. If not, I'm kind of left looking at rebuilding half the machine and that's too expensive and too much bother to be worthwhile right now.

Assorted

I don't know if my board will take DDR3. I might as well post the beast's entire specs rather than just posting the mobo. Here they are, copied and pasted from the order confirmation email:

1 x BB-C2D6PB Barebones Bundles Intel E6600 Core2Duo Heatsink and Fan, 1024mb DDR2 667 Ram, MSI Intel 975X PCI Express motherboard (NB: I removed the RAM listed here; too slow to work with my corsair stuff)

1 x BFG-88GTS BFG GeForce 8800GTS 640MB HDCP Enabled Dual DVI PCI Express (500MHz Core Clock) (1600MHz Memory Clock) (1200MHz Shader Clock)

1 x CSR-X642G Corsair XMS6400 2GB DDR2 (2x1GB) 800Mhz Non-ECC

Beast because I dubbed the machine froggy's beast when I built it 3 1/2 years ago. It was beastly indeed; still plays everything I throw at it on higher settings and smoothly. Everything except civ 5. Some future game specs look concerning.

The prices come from novatech's site; I've used them for most of my PC parts for years and their prices have always beaten the other sites I looked at. They also come out ahead in other areas such as delivery and customer service. Their 4GB 2x2GB kits is £74.99; I can't see the point of spending extra on 4GB when I can save a bit of money and not have parts left over with no use.

Here's a dumb question: Why not migrate the machine over the Windows 7 64-bit and use all the RAM you like?

Two reasons:
1.It's £95! I don't have any way to get a cheap or free version; I know no one else who uses it, and no students either. It's full price or nothing. I then wouldn't be able to get the RAM until the next month; I'm very boring about making sure I budget well.

2. I have a lot of programs which would have been broken by Vista and so I assume they would also be broken by 7. Some would definitely be broken by a directx version above 9. I could dual boot; it's a pain in the rear and I don't want to go through the slog of wiping my current setup and having to rebuild everything .... in duplicate.

[Husar]

Uhm, I've tested it myself(sort of, many, many moons ago with DDR1 or so), and I have seen tests that suggest the performance "boost" of DDR2 800MHz over DDR2 667MHz is negligible(thus smaller and faster is not better than more but slower), around 2% or so. If you still have that 1GB stick lying around I suggest you try whether you can plug that in and see what that feels like. Both RAMs would work at the lower speeds then I guess, but I did that back when I still had DDR1 and it worked. That's if your mainboard accepts the two different RAM sticks of course, there may be mainboards that don't, and it wouldn't cost you anything, if there is no gain that way you can still buy new ones.

[Tellos Athenaios]

I can neither justify or afford a big upgrade. I'm looking for a smaller, cheaper way to give the machine a bit more oomph and keep it a solid gaming machine for another year or so. It's mainly for civ 5 and a couple of forthcoming games; I'm slipping towards the middleground between recommended and minimum in memory and CPU.

Then another GB of RAM/ a better socket 775 CPU (i.e. Core2Duo or Core2Quad)/good SSD best bets. That's listed in terms of decreasing “cheap” and increasing “long term improvement”.

Out of those only RAM is truly the “cheap” option. A CPU is quickly about as expensive as Windows, and a good SSD is easily more expensive than that.

CPU, er not keen. It's a more expensive option, it's a harder DIY upgrade and I don't want to get involved, and it doesn't seem like moving to a faster core2duo or a quadcore would really give that much oomph in return for the cost and pain. Plus my current CPU is meant to be great for overclocking so I can get extra power without spending.

There is more to CPU upgrades than just a faster clock setting. Some things cannot be overclocked out of your existing one. Improvements in actual hardware for instance.

Cache size is something to eyeball here: the bigger it is the more data will fit, and a CPU cache miss means a round trip to RAM which is easily a factor of 1000 or so more time consuming. All Core2Duo's seem to offer lush pastures for those who would attempt overclocking, and all such components come with similar TDP ratings (65W) which means they ought to produce roughly the same amount of heat.

I'd agree with Hussar in saying that it is better to have more RAM than to have less but more fancy RAM (unless that fancy happens to be ECC). RAM running at lower than its maximum performance is still better than a round trip to disk, and 2GB is simply not such a lot of RAM anymore. I'd go for 3GB if you don't want to run a 64bit OS and want to upgrade now. Either a 2x512MB kit or a 1x1GB one.

[Lemur]

[Windows 7] £95! I don't have any way to get a cheap or free version; I know no one else who uses it, and no students either. It's full price or nothing.

As the local plumber would say, there's your problem, lady. You need some geek friends. There's nothing quite like being able to pick up the phone and ask a buddy if he's got a spare hard drive, 120mm fan or Acrobat license. It is imperative that you socialize with some full-time network/IT/hardware geeks and become buds. You'd be amazed at the benefits that you reap from buying a system builder a few beers.

This is much more important than a RAM upgrade. You must cultivate some geeks, and quickly.

[frogbeastegg]

AFAIK this board will support the two different speeds of RAM. I was tempted to leave the other stick in when I built it but was advised to remove it for better performance. I'm not much of a techie so I follow advise. I still have the stick; it's amongst the stuff I left behind at my parents' house when I moved out. I can get it and try it out, maybe next weekend.

There is more to CPU upgrades than just a faster clock setting. Some things cannot be overclocked out of your existing one. Improvements in actual hardware for instance.

True, and I know a better cache is always good. Is it £140 plus pain of installing good? As far as I can see by reading some processor benchmark comparisons it isn't. For something like the E8400 it's around an extra 5FPS on most benchmark tests, on average. Swapping my current core2duo for another doesn't feel like a good investment. I'm quite sure I could go core2quad on this board; again it doesn't feel like a good return for the investment. So few games use all 4 cores I doubt I would see much benefit.

Processors scare me. Other components are like lego. Slot and click, done, maybe a bit of wiring to plug in. Get it wrong and nothing much happens. Easy and I have no problems doing it provided someone warns me of any pitfalls before hand, such as which RAM slot colour needs to be done first. CPUs need thermal paste, are delicate, need fans and heatsinks setting up - all sorts of fiddly things which can go ever so slightly wrong and result in a burned out unit. Extracting the old one doesn't sound like a walk in the park either.

You must cultivate some geeks, and quickly.

It's hard to find geeks, and harder still to get most of them to take me seriously. Most of the time, on hearing that I'm a gamer, they give me this flat look, pointedly turn away and start talking to someone else about games, deliberately blanking me. Everybody knows girls don't play games, and if they did they would be about babies, cleaning and dancing, not real games for real gamers. It's only on the internet that I'm able to mix freely. Out of the three who do treat me like any other gamer, none are the PC tinkering type.

[Lemur]

I always forget about the different flavor of sexism of Britannia. Here, you'd be swarmed with geeks who adore the fact that you game. You'd be just as irritated, probably, but for different reasons.

Still think a couple of geeks who owe you favors would sort this out instantly. Anybody who builds systems has extra licenses. They buy 'em in bulk, and give away the overage to their peeps.

[frogbeastegg]

For the sake of future information - I'll have to go windows 7 eventually - does it have the same effect as vista and break nearly everything that existed prior to its launch? Or did they include decent backwards compatibility this time? Also, would I be able to use directx9 in it?

[Husar]

For the sake of future information - I'll have to go windows 7 eventually - does it have the same effect as vista and break nearly everything that existed prior to its launch? Or did they include decent backwards compatibility this time?

Vista didn't break that much/anything for me so I cannot really comment on this, but 7 has generally been received much better as far as I'm aware.

Also, would I be able to use directx9 in it?

Why wouldn't you?

Not sure how well it runs older games as I don't usually play them anymore, but the higher versions (professional and ultimate I think) come with an XP mode that might help in that regard, haven't tried that though, you may want to look around on the web if that's a big concern for you.

[frogbeastegg]

Why wouldn't you?

Because it comes with directx11 and reverting to an older version of directx has, in my experience, historically proven impossible.

It's a concern because directx10 was the first version to make a conscious break with previous versions. Prior versions were all backwards compatible; 10 was not. That's why I don't have it, despite having a card which supports it and gains extras features if it is present.

I don't know anything about directx11. It's not available for XP.

Not sure how well it runs older games as I don't usually play them anymore, but the higher versions (professional and ultimate I think) come with an XP mode that might help in that regard, haven't tried that though, you may want to look around on the web if that's a big concern for you.

That's the real concern. I have a lot of older games that I like to play, and I know many of them were left broken or glitchy in vista or directx10. Since windows 7 postdates them I expect it has the same issues unless microsoft deliberately paid more attention to getting older programs working. That would be a complete turnaround of attitude; when making vists and 10 they were all about focusing on the future and let the past be damned.

I did a quick google on the XP mode. Seems it's useless for gaming as it's intended for business use. Lots of resource bloat and it will not let you utilise your video card.

[Tellos Athenaios]

XP mode is simply virtualisation through HyperV: it entails running XP in a VM while Windows 7 is running alongside it on the same machine (so two OS'es running at the same time on the same hardware). Requires hardware support in your processor (an Intel with the VT feature or an AMD with equivalent feature) to work, also only included in Windows 7 Pro or more expensive -- and as you say only useful for business use.

[pevergreen]

I play quite a few old games (Win7 pro 64bit) and they work great. Warcraft 2, some early C&C stuff.

Dx9 games work fine, as do DX10 and 11 (275 card)

[Beskar]

If you can get hold of an academic address (ends with .ac.uk), you can get Windows 7 professional for £30. Unfortunately, I would be glad to allow you to use mine, but I have already used it to get Secura her copy of Windows 7.
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/

You can get Windows 7 Home from Amazon for £60

I always forget about the different flavor of sexism of Britannia. Here, you'd be swarmed with geeks who adore the fact that you game. You'd be just as irritated, probably, but for different reasons.

This is far closer to reality here from what I have seen. If anything, there is constant grumbling about the lack of female gamers, as the only female gamers we generally see is some ones girlfriend or wife. Not single and available. I have never witnessed as a case where a female gets shot down, the only time I have seen it is in the case of "newbies", who try to print-screen by putting their monitor on their scanner. I haven't noticed where a female gets looked down upon before, I would love Froggy to turn up at the meets, just to help with the diversity, as the only females are generally avatar-only.

Yeah, I have to agree with Lemur, as to my knowledge, female gamers gets millions of "I love you" after just meeting some one, as they are a rare commodity as gold-dust. I even know a couple of guys who have considered homosexually on the basis of the rarity of the mythical female gamer and they want some companionship.

[frogbeastegg]

Hmm, well it sounds like less of a disaster than vista. The general word of mouth has been positive since the beta; unfortunately I hadn't seen too much about how it relates to my own concerns, as per above.

£30 for a full version which you can use to reinstall your system if you do a reformat? For that kind of money I'd be willing to give Windows 7 a go, and if it didn't play nicely it wouldn't be too much of a nuisance to wipe it all and do a dual boot setup with XP. I don't know anyone with an .ac.uk address. Bah! I never know the right people.

I must be the wrong kind of geek. The place I work at has the largest concentration of gamers I've ever encountered, and less than 1/3 show any acceptance. It's absurd. I had to sit and listen to a group of them discussing how impossible it is to get all the achievements in the xbox version of mass effect; I've done that and it's not hard. Another time one of them was asking one of the three who will talk to me about a game; the nice guy suggested that he ask me about it since I'd played it. The response? "Oh, I'm not interested in it anyway. It must be rubbish." That's not what he was saying seconds before, and a week later he was saying he'd brought it. A couple of weeks ago I was stuck having some of the ignorant ones talk over and around me because they jumped into a conversation I was having with one of the three. I got shut out by weight of numbers. Loads more expamples I won't bore you with. The irony? Out of all of them I'm the hardest of the hardcore.

At my previous job it was better; most of them accepted me as just another gamer. Before that, nightmare. During school, college and university a grand total of one male accepted me, and he was the nice guy sort who would struggle to be anything less than nice to anyone. Every single other one was outright hostile. The other gamers I knew back then were girls, 4 of them.

[Beskar]

Wow, some of those people have a problem. It isn't typical with the crowds I have mixed with, which I jested about in my earlier post.

Yeah, it is reformatable. Only problem is if you try to use the key on different computers, you have to phone up microsoft.

[rory_20_uk]

Of course I'd suggest getting a 64 bit OS, preferably Win7 as it doesn't gobble System memory merely to use Graphic memory. Getting more GB ram is IMO a no brainer certainly to 4 GB. I've played X-Com on Win 7 without a problem.

Other things you can do to save admittedly tiny amounts of memory are to disable things such as serial and parallel ports in the BIOS. It's free, quick to do and as it's very important memory.

[frogbeastegg]

I'm going to try adding the surplus old RAM this weekend. If that doesn't do the trick I think I will be looking at windows 7 plus 4GB new RAM to add to my 2GB, for a total of 6GB.

[frogbeastegg]

Project Old RAM has failed abjectly. The PC won't start up with it added. I've tried twice, and it's been done correctly both times. All RAM removed, wait 2 minutes, insert RAM starting from the left and working right ensuring the green slots are filled first and that the two varieties end up in the correct paired slots. The catches at the end of each slot went down so the sticks weren't too loose or the wrong way around.

Both times the PC failed to boot. I turned it on, heard the fans go into overdrive, and then the PC turned itself off. Seconds later it turns itself on and the cycle repeats. I'm reverting to my original setup now and hopefully that will get the machine working again.

Any suggestions?

[Tellos Athenaios]

If you have been overclocking or fiddling with RAM settings (CAS latency the like) and you rather think that the old RAM is still good (IOW: undamaged) then reverting to factory default settings (possibly clearing CMOS data using a reset button/jumper if you have it) might help. BIOS updates from the motherboard vendor might too. Or the RAM might just be damaged from whatever happened to it at your parents.

[frogbeastegg]

Reverting to my original 2GB of corsair RAM has the PC up and running again.

The old RAM has never been used. It came as part of my barebones bundle and I was recommended to remove it because my purchased RAM is faster. It's been sat in the plastic package that my corsair stuff came in for 3 1/2 years in dry, room temp conditions. It should be ok. I know it used to work because I powered up the barebones when it arrived to check it worked before I started fiddling with it.

I don't know. I've pulled the PC to bits repeatedly today and it's failed to work each time the extra 1GB is in there. At this point it might be better to give up and go the windows 7 plus 4GB of RAM to bring me to a total of 6GB. :considers cost of window 7: Or give up playing civ 5!


EDIT: Bah! Considering the barriers I'm running into and the gains I'll get across the board, I have decided that I'll go with the windows 7 plus 4GB extra RAM option. This XP install is getting doddery anyway, and if I'm going to do a reinstall I may as well do one which is more future proof instead of one which will repeat the same issues. I'll do a dual boot so anything which doesn't work with 7 can go on XP. If I order now I'll have everything for Tuesday.

[Lemur]

I really, really hope you aren't compelled to pay full retail for Win7. Work your connections! Call in favors! Make absurd promises!