2gb ram

[xbonez]

i've got an AMD athlon 64 3200+, 1gb 400 MHz RAm and an ASUS A8N-VM motherboard with a palit X1600 pro 256mb gfx card. if i upgrade my ram to 2gb will it make a difference in the performance of my sys. upto how much ram will show a performance diff in my sys. i use my sys solely for gaming

[shantanu]

for gaming it will surely make a difference, not in present games, but in crysis etc. GTA 4 would run on minimum of 1gb i think and then it will make difference..

[Tech Geek]

a good amount of difference....

[goobimama]

Now that we're on the topic. I've got 512*2 running in Dual channel mode. What if I add another 512, would it affect the performance of the 1GB in dual channel mode?

[wizrulz]

@goobimama, xbonez

YES

xbonez...it will do wonders to the games u already run..and will help u to run future games....

goobimama.....it will not affect ur already running dual channelled rams...

[NikhilVerma]

If you plan on using WinXP then get 2 GB RAM and disable Paging file Or use very very little of it

[shantanu]

@gobimama it will effect , your bandwidth will go half, means if 8000 then will be 4000, and from 128 bit to just 64 bit, if Dual channel didnt effect any thing, then why the technology has been developed. if you add just one more chip. then the setup will now remain dual channel..

[dOm1naTOr]

@goobimama
instead of going for a single 512 more, get 2x256 along with ur current one and ull get 128 bit 800MHZ 1.5GB dual ch mem.

@xbonez
I dun think u can see any big difference in ingame perfomance as ur can wud be a big bottleneck. That means the low perfomance is due to the card and most other components in ur PC can work better in gaming, but they are limited by the slow GPU. U can see a BIG BIG difference in performance if u were using some cards higher than 7900GS or GT.

But ull surely get a boost in loading times as quick loads will take less than a second. And doing as @NikhilVerma said will be great for gaming, but if ur PC goes OFF[no time to shut down] due to any power failure then there is more chance for data corruption as the whole data which was on RAM will be lost and there ll be no copy of it in virtual memory to restore during checkdisk.