Can you ever have too much ram?

[Anonymous]

My laptop is the Acer Ferrari 3200.  It's AMD 64 Mobile Athlon 3200+, with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (128 mb), and every toy you could want in a computer.  Except for some stupid ass reason it came with only 512 MB (256x2) of DDR333 Ram.  So I'm definately upgrading.  I can get 2x512 for like $120 or I can buy a 1 gig stick for around $140 and then stick in one of the 256s that it came with.  Is 1300 megs of ram enough or is there a significant difference for me to spend another $140 and get 2x1024.. The reason why I'm asking is because the computer is 64 bit architecture but it's only a 2 ghz notebook and I'm wondering if 2 gigs of ram might be overkill?  I'm sure that 2 gigs of ram is better than 1300 megs of ram but is it worth it or is the computer not tough enough to need that much ram?

[Anonymous]

I would go for the one stick for if you want to upgrade later you have me space to add.

[Anonymous]

Never.  Go to 4 Gig if you can.

[Anonymous]

Don't forget to find out how much ram it can take, no point in getting a gig if it can only take 512

[Anonymous]

Hell, give your board the max it can take....

[Anonymous]

yeah I just ordered 2 of the gig sticks from Newegg.. I would expect that my MxO experience is going to be slightly different with 2 gigs of pc2700 than with 512

[Anonymous]

4 512M sticks are usually faster than 2 1G sticks because of the way dual channel works... which most laptops don't support anywho.

32bit systems can only address 2G of ram, so anything more is overkill. Depending on how your BIOS handles your AGP aperture, it is possible that haveing more that 2G of RAM is useable - but usually not. Modern video cards with 128-512M of ram really don't need the extra texture memory that the aperture provides.

When 64bit windows rolls out (later this month it looks like) you will be able to address 128G of ram. Of course, most 32bit applications run slower on a 64bit OS, so more ram might not be useful in that case either. It's going to take some time for directx to catch up and take advantage of the 64bit OS as well... so... yeah. It's pretty much wait and see at this point.

[Anonymous]

Does the phrase "more is better" ring a bell?

[Anonymous]

hmmm, I need to upgrade the RAM on this machine also.

[Anonymous]

i think i need to upgrade, but im going to blowing dust off my computer when i get home so we'll have to see what happens.

[Anonymous]

Lol my Pc Is only 512mb of RAM Im upgrading it with another 1gig of DDR333 Duel Channel Ram Adding that to my little Dell Dimension is will have over 1.5gigs of RAM

[Anonymous]

Pfft my Dell isnt Little lol

[Fuse]

Ratio said everything I was going to, and a tad bit more.
Make 2G your max. You will use the 2G on occasion, and unless your doing something VERY intensive, or running a server machine you will barely ever use more than that-and even then it usually becomes more of a processor based speed reliance.

[Ketamininja]

5 gig would be too much for me.... my mobo can only take 4GB!!
Watch out for DUAL CHANNEL technology: IF your motherboard is capable of this, then get two sticks. IE, 2 x 512 sticks will run faster than 1 x 1024 stick.

You can further your quest for RAM by getting a better latency on the module.
Look for CAS and RAS information in google. You can also overclock your RAM.

These days, if you have an AMD CPU, you are looking at 400Mhz (433?) Maximum speed, whilst Intel can go up to 800Mhz (these figures might already be beaten, I haven't checked too intensely lately). Bear in mind the architecture for both types are different, which is why an XP 3500+ really runs at 2.2Ghz or something... Thats the real speed, but the architecture makes it faster.

If you really wanna boost your system, you could overclock. I think I heard some Swedish guy got 5GHz, or something, before it blew up lol

[Anonymous]

Ya... My mobo can only support 2 gigs max (only 2 slots) and I already have one PC2700 512 stick in there atm. I'm just ordering another 512 stick rather than a gig stick. I would have gotten two gig sticks but I don't have that much cash to spend atm... besides, slowly saving for new parts to just build a new computer.

And now I wait on newegg to deliver my savior from lag (or at least reduce it lol )