How to fill RAM

clansman

I dont know if this is the right thread, plz move it if its not

i have 640ddr ram, and i want to get as much as i cant out of it. i have disabled paging through regedit and i still only used about 200 - 250 mb.
i play a lot of games and the ram comes in handy then, but when i'm not playing games its just lying around the place doing nothing. Is there any way to map my graphic card ram to system ram.... or anything like that....

sceptre

If you've dumped your paging file and you're still not using all your memory, be happy. Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to use it if your apps don't want it. Those little capacitors don't have to be used all day every day.

po0k

Originally posted by clansman
I dont know if this is the right thread, plz move it if its not

i have 640ddr ram, and i want to get as much as i cant out of it. i have disabled paging through regedit and i still only used about 200 - 250 mb.
i play a lot of games and the ram comes in handy then, but when i'm not playing games its just lying around the place doing nothing. Is there any way to map my graphic card ram to system ram.... or anything like that....

well considering that the ram on your graphics board runs at about twice th speed of your main system ram and that ~64meg is pretty much sufficient for most games today means that if you were to use your system ram for the graphics you'd pretty miuch half your FPS.
AGP mainly only comes into play when dumping the textures onto the board when the level's loading or burst access when neccesary mid-game.

spooky donkey

I have the same amount of ram and type as you and i never really need or use that much!

The only reason i wnated so much ( and am concidering getting more ) is for when im hosting a game server at a LAN party and i have 10 - 15 players connected to my server. They recomend 16 megs for every player on youre server.
So 15 player LAN game would like to have 240 megs of ram spare in adition to what youre opperating system and games uses. So uasually 512 megs of ram is a nice number for that porpouse.

conZ

If your playing CS, try get into the HL command line (i.e. c:/sierra/half-life/hl.exe -game cstrike -- can be done through a shortcut (?) or gamespy) and after cstrike type '-heapsize 256000'.

this means you'll use ~256mb ram when playing.

clansman

what will improve by using 256mb of ram on half life/cs?

i dont have the games installed at the mo.

Can i do the same thing with other games?

Silent Bob

If you really want all your RAM to be doing something useful all the time install a *nix OS like GNU/Linux or *BSD.

They'll use whatever RAM is left over as a HD cache and in my experience very rarely if ever touch swap-space.


Oh, disabling paging won't affect the amount of memory processes use. They won't somehow need more memory just because you disabled paging. If they all fit into main memory with hundreds of MB to spare with paging on, then they will all fit in with paging off.

Capt'n Midnight

Some OS's have limits to how much ram they can recognise.

If you have NT/W2K/XP then check out boot.ini settings - you can disable portions of memory - if your PC then runs slower you are using the ram !

Again there is a reg setting on not swapping out system files - takes 12MB of ram - probably worth doing

If you are using win9x then you can use a ram drive and copy files into boot up - sort of pre-caching.

Also check if your OS is using all the cache on your CPU..

Gerry

if you have win9x, upgrade to win2k or xp. They make far better use of available ram. To be honest, you won't get much use out of your ram all the time. If you aren't using your machine for professional 2d/3d rendering or video editing, you'll never use much more than 250mb for any one program. However, what you will find is that if you leave your machine on, it will get very fast over time as all the small things will stay in ram after being loaded once. You will have dramatically reduced game loading times, also windows will be much more reponsive after you exit a game, it won't have to swap itself back into ram cos the game never had to swap it out. Once you have over 256mb of ram, you are also able to alt-tab between windows and a game pretty instantly also, handy for online gaming.

A mate of mine had a gig of ram in his machine running win2k, and it got extremely fast over time.