Is RAM as important as it Used to be?

[Guest]

Back in the days of my P133 the best way to increase the performance of your system was a memory upgrade, it always seemed to produce the best results. Now I have an Athlon 800, MSI K7T Pro 2-A, SB Live Value, Geforce 2 MX, with a 30 GB Fujitsu HD (5400RPM) and 128 MB PC133 SDRAM running win98se, mostly for games, some graphics and programming (MS Visual C++, if it matters) would increasing to 256 MB PC133 or higher be as dramatic as it used to be? and would it be worth the performance increase?

Thanks in Advance,
Andre

 

[Guest]

the performance increase is not as marked as it used to be but I run W2K and 128 would not be enough and once you cache to disk I think you know what happens to your performance....(I use at least 512mb in all of my PC's).

M

Opinions are like arseholes .... everybody’s got one....

 

[ejsmith2]

You'll see a boost, but i'm not sure if it's as much as you're wanting. I can get deusex to chew up around 95meg, but that's under win2k. The nice thing under win98 is you can crank the disk cache up to 65meg, and it will operate on par with win2k. At least, for the short time it has before whittling down on the 'system' resources.

At $41 for 128meg or $56 for 256meg (including s/h), I consider/considered it a worthy addition.

 

[wapaaga]

it all depend on how much you start out with
if you start with 32 and go to 96 then yes your going to see an improvement, but anything above 128 dosen't really show an improvment unless your you use lots of big files form some programs

like photo and large datbases

 

[ledzepp98]

i think it's very untrue that anything above 128 will not have a noticeable difference in everyday computing. if you have an overall good system, you will notice a good difference going from 128 to 256, and i'm not talking about photoshop of video editing. if you have more than one or two windows open at a tme and you frequently switch back and forth, 256megs will feel much snappier than 128. personally, with ram prices as low as they are i would say 128megs is an absolute minimum and i wouldn't recommend anything less than 192. i have 384 right now with win2k and i would say that if i took out a 128meg chip there wouldn't be much of a difference in regular use. anything less and there would be. when i used win98 it was the same situation. when ran was $1-$1.50 per meg, 128megs was the right amount as far as price/performance. now that ram is less than $0.50 per meg for good ram, 256megs is the right amount as far as price/performance...