How Much Ram?

[Chewy]

Well with a poweruser setup, shrink won't even use all my 512, the ram I will put back in runs at 250membus and cas 2.5, the new ram won't carry that speed and has to be clocked below 200. With an overclocked amd64 running
at 270-290(standard is 200) the memory become the bottleneck. Until you run out of ram, multitasking or some real heavy graphics or gaming apps, the fastest ram wins, quality before quantity. Now if the 512 wasn't enough and the apps have to go to the swap file, then that's like 100 times slower than ram.

[UncasMS]

no less than 1gig for serious work

especially when using something better than shrink
any decent encoder will eat up a great deal of your 512 mb ^_~

[anonymez]

no less than 1gig for serious work

true

and photoshop will take a considerable amount when working with hi res stuff from say my crappy 6mp camera. more than that cause i usually work with at least 4 layers. it'll take even more if you let it through preferences-->memory & image cache

games such as BF2 do benefit from 2GB-- i swear, i saw it with my own eyes

and sometimes a dualcore isn't enough-- gotta have tons of available ram to do some real multitasking

[Furiousg]

Just talking about all that power makes me weep
I need another mortgage

[NightbladeXX]

The Larger the RAM yes the more expensive as the chip density is more difficult to achieve at the same given speed as a smaller stick. Thats why the DDR2 isnt taking off at the 667 MHz speeds since there is no performance gains over he regular DDR 3200 or 333 MHz this is for the 1 GB sticks in dual channel.

to make it comparable a 512 MB DDR 3200 running at 2.5 cas 2.5-3-3-6 is just a tad slower than a 1 GB DDR 3200 running at 2 CAS 2-3-3-6 but the 1GB sticks can handle more data and if your system runs outta availible system memory and has to utilize the Swap file then the performance gain is lost and the 1GB sticks are difinately faster.

IMO - GET as big as you can afford with the lowest latency your mobo can handle

and always run MemTest-86 to test your new sticks

nB

[LT. Columbo]

whatever i buy will be from the local pc store, so what about compatibility, installation? can i get more than 1 GB?

[Chewy]

lt, everest tells all, post an overclock report, no need for all the dumps tho