256MB RAM is enough

Balfa

PLEASE NOTE ALL THE FOLLOWING IS PURELY MY OPINION, NOT BACKED UP BY ANYTHING BUT MY OWN EXPERIENCE

I have 256MB of RAM (with XP1700 & Ti4200) and have had for the last few years. I play games and watch movies and browse web pages in many many IE and mozilla windows at once and do pretty much everything with my computer, and my system barely ever pages. I have yet to find a reason to want more RAM.

My point is that in my opinion, 256MB is perfectly adequate for most use, even recent games, and certainly anything over 384MB of RAM is overkill and will be for at least another 12-18 months. Anything above 512MB is seriously only for "specialist" needs, or to impress chicks ;P

I consider myself a sensible hardware buyer and buy the best value rather than the latest & greatest (got the Ti4200 for e105 in december and the XP1700 for e40 in june). This is just my considerable opinion and I hope that people upgrading / building new systems will find this useful. People spend far too much on pc hardware these days. Especially when you consider that you could buy 256MB now, and in a years time buy another 128 or 256 for next to nothing.

I now leave the floor open to others who want to express similar/opposing opinions, but please no flames......

MrPinK

Right now all I have running is my browser and I'm using up 280Mb of my 768Mb total. No sysem *needs* that much to function, but it doesn't make things run a lot better. I would find going back to 256 unbareably.

tman

yeah, i've had feck all trouble with 384mb for the last 8 months...
i've only seen rambooster go into the red a couple of times (copying a large file & running soundforge)
most games play fairly badly on meh pc, so i can't really comment on that.
if i was building a new pc i'd go for 2x512 sticks on a dual ddr mobo tho.
purely to get the chicks:)

rabbitinlights

With the Price of Ram these days its doesnt actually bankrupt you to go over 256?
I just Built a new PC and i went for

2 x 512Mb DDR400 Corsair PC3200 (Matched Pair)
Running on an Abit IC-7 with a P4 2.4Ghz

Mainly with Half life 2 in mind and the fact that i hopefully wont have to open my case for a good while,

256Mb is enough but the more the better i say.............

Balfa

pink, i'm running browser (mozilla, which takes up more ram than IE because it's not OS-integrated) and winamp right now on win2k and it's using 87MB of RAM.
280MB used on "idle" is weird! Could you do me a favour and post like, the top 15 mem-eating processes running on your system? maybe just a screenshot of taskman, sorted by memory column?

Rabbitinlights is helping make my point, i think. The whole "with the price of ram these days" thing is true, but the same can be said for the price of CPUs, hard drives, cd burners, video cards, motherboards, everything... pretty soon you've got a machine that costs over a grand, whereas i'm trying to spread awareness that people on a budget can build a machine that'll EAT up anything you throw at it for bugger-all. especially true if you're upgrading and already have the big standard items like monitor and case.

But that 280MB that pink's quoting is bizarre. I think that just goes to show you, the more ram you give windows, the more it needs

Creamy Goodness

rabbitinlight i've the same setup as you lol


u can never have enough ram

Creamy Goodness

i'm using 188mb out of 1024mb

MrPinK

There aren't any memory intensive processes running at all (except mozilla). It's being used by XP iteslf. If you have the memory, there are lots of tweaks to improve performance, such as keeping the kernel in mem at all time and not let it be paged, or increasing the IoPageLockLimit. These aren't exactly necessities, I know, but it's nice to have things running at their best.

Let's do what we can to eliminate virtual memory forever

Spoonman

Try playing battlefield1942 on a system with only 256 ram and then on a system with 512 and tell me you don't notice any difference

256 is enough tho for most applicacations, its in games that eat a lot of ram that the 512 kicks in the most. Remember a lot of games too can be tweaked to eat up more ram & we'll be seeing a lot more of memory hungry games like bf42 soon.

Col_Loki

Erm 256mb ........ ouch wouldnt be my cup of tea !! I know for some one who is using their pc for internet browsing, word docs, ..... not pc intensive applications - 256mb is enough.

Personally im always multi-tasking, like having my pc ripping DVD's , listenin 2 music or watchin divx's, downloading from network......... was constantly in the red memory wise with 384mb. Using 512mb at the min & have Pc4000 ram comming monday - should sort the problem.

With Ram prices as low as €65 for 512mb i think its crazy to be advising people to go for 256mb ??
If people spend €20 extra on ram now, will they really be kicking themselves in 6months about it ?? - personally id be delighted i went the bit extra.

Creamy Goodness

true i bought two sticks of 512mb ddr400 off komplett for 70 euros each it was a bargin

PPC

Originally posted by Spoonman
Try playing battlefield1942 on a system with only 256 ram and then on a system with 512 and tell me you don't notice any difference

Last time i checked iirc, BF1942 was taking up just over 300Mb of ram while running.
At the moemnt iexplorer is taking close on 30 and svchost just over 17 and explorer just over 16.5Mb

Ryo Hazuki

I used to have 256mb Ram + a 64mb GFX Card.

When I upped to a 256mb card, the difference in UT2K3was VERY noticeable in terms of swapping, almost so much that I didnt really need to buy more ram.

But I got an extra 512 anyway, so now its 768:)

But that 280MB that pink's quoting is bizarre. I think that just goes to show you, the more ram you give windows, the more it needs

Or rather, The more ram you give windows, the more it can use to improve performance.

mike65

Every time I buy more memory I say "thats it, I could never want
anymore!" but it seems I'm always wrong, got 256 right now and am waiting for another 256 in the post (sadly I'll have to sacrifice
a 64 stick to free up a slot so I'll actually have 512-64 whatever that is!)

To think my first memory upgrade was from 8 to 12 mb!

Mike.

GUI

xp is a complete memory hog..
it uses up 100megs of ram out of the box!

L1011

ahem, i think anything less than 512 is suicidly low

I'm idling on 117MB, admittadly with the entire OS loaded in the RAM (BeOS, Windows needs 1GB to load into RAM by this stage). Change browser to Mozilla and its 150 MB, and wham a big playlist into Soundplay (which preloads) and its 170MB... and this is normal surfing

I can cope with 256MB for BeOS, but for Linux and Windows I cannot use a machine without 512.

sceptre

Originally posted by GUI
xp is a complete memory hog..
it uses up 100megs of ram out of the box!

Ah, funny how times change. I remember testing an alpha release of Wndows 2000 back in early 1997 and being shocked that it needed 32 megs to get going. Mind you, 4megs of RAM cost something like 80 quid at the time.

PiE

Originally posted by Balfa
(got the Ti4200 for e105 in december..]

Where?

NeverSayDie

Well, if you're into software development 512mb or more of RAM can certainly be put to good use - I work off 256mb at the moment without much trouble, but for bigger projects and newer tools (VS .NET 2003, etc), more RAM would definetely be useful.

Similar would apply for doing a lot of art/graphics work or video editing, AFAIK.

Kali

The only app I've ever seen and used that requires large amount of memory is 3D Studio Max, on certain renders I've seen its usage climb to the 750MB mark... all our graphics machines in work have at least a gig of ram... all the normal workstations for the multimedia developers have 512, which is more than enough for windows and several apps.

For those running *nix gateways Squid can be a bit of a hog too... depending on what size your cache is set to.

The_Bullman

This is what I was using this evening.

Normally I use about 400megs, I was just running an extra program.

And obviously Balfa doesn't play battlefield. That game simply loves all the ram it can get

quozl

Planetside is even worse than bf1942. 512mb stopped most of the paging, but it took 768 to get rid of it all in big battles.

Gerry

Well, if you don't play games or do 3d rendering/video editing, 256 is plenty, to be honest you could even get away with 128. ( on 9x/2000 )
But most modern games are happiest with 384 or 512 ram, you do get less paging. In terms of windows, well, if you put in a gig of ram, and never switch your machine off, you start to see the benefits. Everything gets loaded to ram, and you can alt-tab out of any game with no paging.
I think XP is far more memory hungry than 2k, it seems as sluggish as hell on a laptop thats twice as fast as mine ( which has 2k/linux dual boot )

A lot of people would rather add more ram than wonder whats eating it all up though... people unfortunately do like to boast about how much ram is in your machine, only geeky chicks are going to be impressed though.

The_Bullman

Originally posted by Gerry
only geeky chicks are going to be impressed though.

Don't say that. Let me believe that every girl can be turned on by my gig of ram

vibe666

I got a stick of 512mb 2 years ago and the girl in the shop looked at me like I'd asked her for a betamax video machine!

the best bit was when she asked me why I wanted a 512mb stick of RAM, and I told her it was because I couldn't afford two of them . WHich at the time happened to be true, but she thought i was taking the p1ss.

Anyway, when I was trying to write CD's, surf the net, download/share lots of stuff I really wished I had the extra stick of 512, but alas those days are gone, and I'm struggling with a 56k connection and no CD burner, so the 512 I have now (in a 2nd hand P3 650 laptop I've just bought through ebay) is doing me fine

more is better though, and if i was building a new pc or buying a new laptop, it would be 1gb all the way!

_CreeD_

For general and gaming use I think 512mb with 2k or Xp is grand at the moment, 256 is squeezing things (it's functionaly but that's about it). I have a 1Gb in at the moment and that regularly gets maxed these days working on music, sooo another lurvely 512mb is on it's way via ebay, I wonder how long that'll last :rolleyes:

Balfa

Thanks for all the replies. I still stick by my opinion. Games run just fine (althoguh it's true, i don't play BF) Out of interest, all of you who are upgrading RAM, can you do some before-and-after benchmarks, or something, so we can see some figures behind yer claims

Er, is it just me, or has RAM suddenly jumped in price?

Originally posted by PiE
Where?

Ahhh, sweet sweet newegg.com. Unfortunately you need an american shipping AND billing adderss

rabbitinlights

Er, is it just me, or has RAM suddenly jumped in price?

Id say the quality and speed has increased with the price, >PC3200 etc are obviously more expensive than older Ram but id say the older ram is the same price it always was if not cheaper.....

Balfa

Originally posted by rabbitinlights
Id say the quality and speed has increased with the price, >PC3200 etc are obviously more expensive than older Ram but id say the older ram is the same price it always was if not cheaper.....

I don't think so. The cheapest sticks of 512 are over e90 in most places now. A month ago you could 512 for under e60. I remember this used to happen a lot, when RAM fabs totally overproduced and there was far too much supply, the price would be ridiculously low, then they'd lower production and when the excess dried up, the price would leap up again. I bought 128MB in 1999, the month after i bought it, the price rocketed, and didn't drop below what i paid for another 18 months. I hope we don't have to wait 18 months for 512MB to be found for $50 again

RicardoSmith

If you are running any decent 2D app, 3D app, game or resonable development machine 256 crawls.

unkel

Have had 512MB for the last 3 years and this is no way good enough to stop using swap file using XP or W2K. I'm not into games. Minimum spec for mid / high range pc to be built today 1GB imho possibly more if you're into games.

Surprised noone has quoted Billy Boy that 640KB was gonna be enough for anyone forever