Quote Originally Posted by Xiahou
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.

Quote Originally Posted by Beskar
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.

Quote Originally Posted by Lemur View Post
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.