Hi there,

I was wondering: would it really be of help to upgrade a 4 Gb system to 8 Gb using a vLited Vista for gaming? I'm currently with 4 Gb (1 GB x 4).

Thanks for any opinion,

Rebêlo.

unless your running a x64 edition of vista it will not recognize above 4gb.

and if you are, i doubt it would make any difference since i havent found anything thatll use all of the 3327mb of my 4gb that is available

On the x86 front, only Server 2003 and 2008 Enterprise and Datacenter editions can "see" and use memory above 4GB - no x86 versions of XP or Vista will use any RAM above 4GB if you add /PAE to boot.ini (although it will let you create a pagefile larger than 4GB).

If you want to run XP or Vista and use 8GB or more of RAM, you'll need to run XP or Vista x64.

rebelo, 4GB is plenty for games these days. 8GB could only make Vista go even smoother if you do a lot of HDD activity, it will keep more in memory. Even though I didn't notice any difference when going from 2GB to 4GB, only in games.

Biggest usage I saw was while playing Supreme Commander strategy, it took 1.7GB as a single process. But that game isn't the best example of programming, it has many issues with slowdowns and crashing. Probably memory leaks are what made it so big in the first place.

I understand the urge to upgrade while DDR2 is so cheap but I would simply wait for a new gen and upgrade to DDR3 when it is more mature and reasonably priced. Or SSD hdd yumm.

Vista x32 WITH sp1 rc can see 4.0 GB RAM (i think it utilizes PAE) . Dunno about >4gb, but before sp1 windows recognized only 3332 MB.

No, adding more ram isn't going to help you. Any ram that goes un-used doesn't benefit you at all. And as others have pointed out, you need to be running the 64bit version of Windows to even see the 8gb. If you find your framerate lacking, sounds like your CPU and/or video card isn't up to snuff.

Also since you're running Vista, if you have Aero running, try turning it off and see if it improves your gaming speed.

Photoshop will use it, even under 32 bit OS.

You'd be better off with a fast RAID-0 array (like 4 SATA disks with 16 MB buffer each, with 256k stripe).

There's no significant difference from 3 GB to 6 GB of memory in my Server 2008 Domain Controller, and I have Streaming Media Services 2008, TrendMicro OfficeScan Server on IIS7, DHCP and DNS on top of which I also do my daily stuff via remote desktop.

Hi there,

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

I guess I'll stick with 4 Gb and Vista x64 for now!

Thanks once again,

Rebêlo.

I have more than 4GB too, i have about 8GB, 4x2GB. I find it does help if your developing stuff and your using Virtual PCs, i was currently running two or three Virtual Pcs which used 2GB of memory each, but thats in an extreme case, normally you wouldnt be doing that. But unless you got something which requires that much memory, 4GB will be enough for most people.

For some reason though, my Vista x64 Ultimate seems to enter Windows using 1GB, then goes up to 1.5GB usage, not sure how i can reduce the memory usage.