Quick memory question

[Aspman]

Setup:

Athlon 3000+ Barton (333 FSB) no oc.
512 DDR3200
80Gb Maxtor IDE
DVD+CDRW
ASUS AV7X-X
GeForce FX5200 256Mb
Win XPpro

USE:
Little bit of gaming but tends to be stuff a year or two old
Digital image editing
Basic other uses

Q: Is it worth upgrading the memory to 1Gb?

I've thought about it for a while but I'm really not sure if I would notice any difference.
Machine does tend to bog down a bit if I'm using photoshop with other things (especially after SP2) and I wondered if the extra 512 would smooth it out a bit.

[nihil]

Hi Aspman,

Yes, you will notice the difference when photoediting. Also with some high end games.

[SirDice]

Have a look at your swapfile when working.. If your swapfile hardly gets used then you won't notice any difference in speed by upgrading your memory.

[unvi$ible]

hi,
as you have asus motherboard you can download little utility (asus probe) which will give you some insight into temp, fans and memory and so on.
on mine pc which has very similar components memory never gets over 56% (512 3200 400).
So all this memory is never used to on even 60%.i dont see any benefits to put another stick there.( i know they quite cheap nowdays but in my personal excperience (i put extra 512) didnt see any improvments in speed but thats definitelly cheapes way to little upgrade
very similar question has been posted no long time ago will try to find it for you.
you can download probe at:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3301.html
srry tied on asus site but stuffed something with link.
www.asus.com

[Aspman]

Yup I know the app you mean. I had it running for quite a while but it regularly doesn't pic up one of my fans and starts it's beeping nonsense.

Its a good reminder though I'll switch it on and see what it says.

[unvi$ible]

hi hmm
when you instale it you can set up treshold for temperature and fans so if they go over alarms comes on(thats your beeping) which is good thing but bad if you ignore it lol.
you can even set it up for pc to shut downs if they reach the set tresholds.
ok i found the tread and here it is.
i found it interesting
http://www.antionline.com/showthread...ghlight=memory

[Katja]

What I did to increase performance was increase the virtual memory to 2 GB in size. (Both minimum and maximum set to 2048 MB) It sounds like wasteful but with a 200 GB of harddisk space, you barely notice this. As a result, the speed will increase slightly because Windows doesn't have to increase this file size whenever you need more virtual memory.
Of course, it also helps if you've set up this virtual memory on the fastest disk in your system, if you have more than one disk.
Defragmentising your disk once in a while will also improve performance a bit. Even with an NTFS system.
And of course, if you're absolutely sure that you're not connected to the Internet then you might temporarily disable your virusscanner and firewall for a better performance. But that's a bit risky because you might forget to turn them on again once you connect to the Internet again.

[nihil]

Machine does tend to bog down a bit if I'm using photoshop with other things

It is photoshop. Unless it is different from just about every other photo editor and CAD package I have encountered it uses uncompressed temporary files in the background. These are only recompressed when you save them.

My XP Pro box uses 320Mb of RAM without doing very much. That does not leave very much if you are handling .bmp type files in the background.

Just check out modern CAD setups, they all have 3 or 4 Gb of RAM at least

The idea is to get it all to happen in RAM, NOT in virtual memory. I would also note that the top end CAD systems also have 15,000Rpm SCSI drives or whatever, so if you do have to use the HDD it happens twice as fast

[Aspman]

Starting to sound dim now is my pagefile the same as the swop file?

PF running at about 276Mb

[!mitationRust]

Originally posted here by Aspman
Starting to sound dim now is my pagefile the same as the swop file?

PF running at about 276Mb

Page File = NT
Swap File = *nix

I seriously doubt you'll see an increase (for the money), how much photoshop*ing you do?

Overclock it to see a real increase.

Edit:
windows uses PF even when there is more than enough to go around....mine is at 160_512channelDDR and another machine at 135 on idle 512DchannelDDR


Physical memory isn't adding up ......there’s a better way to judge this. TimAxe probably knows the nuts and bolts of it. I'm going to do some reading of my own on it.