I currently have:

4 sticks of 1Gb (4Gb) 1066 DDR2 RAM

Would I see a significant difference with:

4 sticks of 2Gb (8Gb) 800 DDR2 RAM?

What is you ram usage like at the moment?

In what respect?

I play modern games occasionally (Far Cry 3, DCS A-10 (flight sim) etc) without significant evidence of struggle but I could do with some more.

Other than that I do Photoshop and some vid now and then.

I'm up for the move to 8Gb as my last upgrade for this machine but not sure moving down to 800Mhz will negate the benefit.

More RAM is better than less faster RAM as it means less paging to disk. Ignore anyone that says otherwise!

Also, the difference at DDR2 speeds is sweet fack all really

Ok, cool.  Thanks.

Only really makes a difference if you are paging to disk.

If you run 8gb of ram but are only ever seeing 30% use of physical memory then you'll actually see a slowdown due to the decrease in speed.

Windows only uses swap when it needs to due to all the other applications using up your physical ram, granted there is a margin there in that if I was seeing 80% phys mem usage I'd say do the upgrade (as you use photoshop and do vid editing this is highly likely) but if you're using it to browse the Internet, do office work and watch a few movies, I'd probably go with sticking with the higher data rate ram as you will ( even though ram operations are imperceptible to human senses) cut the performance of your ram.

Windows uses enough RAM for itself before you even start with apps, those games all will make use of the available RAM and Photoshop eats RAM for breakfast (knowing the quality of Eagle's work too I bet he's using large files, lots of layers, caching and history states) so IMO its a no brainer. 4GB is sub par.

Aye but he's running 4gb ddr2 ram... He is likely running windows XP with that out of date spec and that doesn't hoof as much ram as say windows 8 for example.

Well, the only way to know for sure is for him to have a typical amount of work open and show us a screengrab of task manager's performance tab.

the problem with that though is that in things like Photoshop the paging only starts when you start doing something, not sitting watching task manager.

for the price of ram now, I think it's well worth it

I noticed the difference going from 4gb to 8gb on winxp... that was when ram was expensive and I still thought it was well worth it after :-)

Just make sure you are running a 64bit OS otherwise the upgrade will be pointless :-)

Quote from: XEntity on January 20, 2013, 12:00:17 PM
Just make sure you are running a 64bit OS otherwise the upgrade will be pointless :-)

good point

also, 8gig of ddr2 is £80 now.... more than I expected... but still well worth it

wat's the rest of the spec of your machine like ? it might only be a couple of hundred for a new cpu/mb/ram ?

• Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q6600 2.4GHz
• Asus P5K-e
• Vista 64
• AMD Radeon 6870 2Gb

Money isn't an object - just no time to do a rebuild.

why you still running Vista its one of the worst OS's ever made, up their with ME.

Because it's fast, 100% stable and hasn't let me down since I first installed it.

Besides, I can't stand the new versions of Windows Mail (can't stand alternatives either).