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RAM Upgrade

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Johnnyk42

Technical User
Nov 13, 2004
5
US
I have a AMD 64 bit 2.0 GHTZ processor and I have 512 mb ram and I was wondering in everyone's opinion if an extra 512 mb ram would really improve the quality of my computer speed or if it would be barely noticable
 
if it supports the dual channel mode for your RAM. And you get another RAM stick, that is the exact same as the one you already have model number and everything. it should improve your speed by about 30 percent. But the RAM has to be identical for the dual channel mode will work.
 
Johnnyk42
Athlon 64 socket 754 is single channel
Athlon 64 Socket 939 is dual channel

Generally increasing ram over 512mb has little performance gain unless you are using applications that demand large amounts of ram ie: video editting/encoding etc
It's called deminishing returns ie: on a single channel board going from 512mb to 1GB will increse the performance by less than 3%
As mikker indicated, if you have a socket 939 motherboard (which use's on chip dual channel) a maching pair of memory modules does boost performance, not because of the increased memory size, although that does help a little but by virtue of dual channel band width and memory optimisation.
I wouldn't be quite as generous as mikker, from what I have read the gains are under 10% but still well worth while.
Guess I could carry out the test myself? but I'm sure the figure would be between 5/10% on a dual channel moby.

MSI MS-7025 K8N Neo2 Platinum (nforce3 250) socket 939
2x 512 DDR3200
Athlon64 3500

Also be aware of the gains when using quality low latency memory at 1T timings, again in pairs but single channel socket 754's can also benefit.

Martin


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Yeah, there are two points made here:

1) Increasing RAM above 512MB only helps in certain applications, mainly multimedia ones, that need it. Windows in general won't necessarily run much faster.

2) Going from single-channel to dual-channel is a bigger jump, which give you as much as a 10-15% boost depending on the application.


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