Just 2GB of ram

[panais]

I have only 2 dimms of ram installed in my computer 2x1024mb in dual channel.

1 Question) Is my 2GB crucial ballistix PC2 800Mhz enough and capable for a GOOD GAMING? Did i lag in anything? As fps,texture details,colors,light,speed,etc?

Good Gaming i mean...
Crysis 2 warhead
Dead Space
Sacred 2
Fallout 3
Left 4 Dead
All in Resolution 1920x108p+full antialiasing+VSync+very high details.

Motherboard Gigabyte GA_X38_DS4
Cpu Q6600
HD150GB 10.000 rpm raptor
Graphic Card Ati Radeon 3870x2
Os Vista Ultimate 32bit

2 Question) How much memory i need for a GOOD GAMING in Vista 32 bit sp1?

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

if you have Vista x64, 4 GB will show up. On 32-bit Vista, you might get 3.2GB. You are pushing the settings on your video card, it might be your limiting factor over RAM.

 

[bruce2]

Hi Panais, what you got will do fine more or less with all the games listed except Crysis will eat you up even if you had AA and VS off but still playable.

If you really like to do something simple to the unit that would give you peace of mind, you can add a couple or more gigs of rams and up grade to V64 to address all of them including the 1 gig in your gpus. You may see a few more fps after all that trouble. Lol.

For any big improvement, upgrade, or project; I would way at least 6 months to see how the i7 stuffs pricing. Or, at least wait till the DDR3 rams to go down.

Great gaming!

 

[panais]

Hi Panais, what you got will do fine more or less with all the games listed except Crysis will eat you up even if you had AA and VS off but still playable.

If you really like to do something simple to the unit that would give you peace of mind, you can add a couple or more gigs of rams and up grade to V64 to address all of them including the 1 gig in your gpus. You may see a few more fps after all that trouble. Lol.

For any big improvement, upgrade, or project; I would way at least 6 months to see how the i7 stuffs pricing. Or, at least wait till the DDR3 rams to go down.

Great gaming!

So Ur advice is to step on Vista 64bit?
U mean with vista 32bit i use only the half power of my hardware and especially half GPU power?

 

[bruce2]

Yep.:D

64 and your quad are most beneficial for Crysis. Other then that, you can use more rams which seems faster on everything especially in multitasking, at least it is in your mind. Try 64, if give you problem with your hardwares and utilities, which is not likely; then switch back. Either way you will be happy.

 

[beaua]

You aren't necessarily using half the power with 32bit as not all programs are optimized for 64 bit coding. It's just cutting your ram short mainly, but still, there's no reason not to upgrade to it since you have the hardware for it and most apps are backwards compatible.

 

[sygnus21]

To your question:

2 gig of RAM with your current system should give you decent gaming. I'm not sure your video card can handle everything "maxed" at that resolution, even if it is a 3870x2, but that's on the video card.

Now,

For anyone going with 4gig of RAM and 1gig of video card memory, whether a 1gig card or 2 x 515meg cards, you really ought to be looking at a 64bit OS.

In the above scenario the math equals 5 gig, but in reality you'd really only have 3gig (or less) of accessible memory + 1gig of video memory = equals 4gig total under a 32bit OS. As you can see, you lose 1gig to the video card(s)!

This is known as MMIO (Memory Mapped Input Output).

Corsair has a good analysis of that here: http://www.corsair.com/_appnotes/AN804_Gaming_Performance_Analysis.pdf. (do note that this is a .pdf file). Check out the "Office Block" illustrations on page 2-3.

Here's a quote from the article:

In simple terms MMIO is a process by which some devices in the PC exchange data with the CPU/memory. One such device is the graphics card, which requires an amount of address space equal to its frame buffer size (the amount of memory installed on the card) to be ‘reserved’ for such data exchanges. This reserved address space is therefore not available to Windows as accessible memory.

The article was written to shed light on 4gig vs 2gig gaming performance. So...

 

[roy69]

2 gigs will be fine. The OS will use the GPU memory first anyway.