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.