For those of you with 2 GB RAM - do you feel it's enough?

By Elliot B.
in Poll Station

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Is 2 GB RAM enough?  

405 members have voted

  1. 1. Is 2 GB RAM enough for you at the moment?

    • Yes
      224
    • No
      181

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Grand Master

Elliot B.

Posted
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Do you currently believe the 2 GB RAM you have in your machine is enough?

Personally, I don't. It takes 20 seconds to redraw Aero in Vista after playing games such as Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Crysis for an hour or two and I always take that as a sign that I need more RAM.

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morphen

Posted
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I have 2gb ram on my media center,server and my laptop.

But on my Gaming computer i have 4GB, running vista x64, so I am planning a 8GB upgrade, but i'm still afraid of problems with 32-bit games. Now if they would only release a 64-bit version of hl2/tf2. :D

Grand Master

Elliot B.

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Well, a game tends to use up all available memory (unless you have an insane amount of it), so what you really should be asking for is a way to instruct windows to retain the Aero cache in RAM instead of allowing Windows to dump it all to pagefile.

2 GB isn't ideal for such modern games at high resolutions at such high detail levels. I'm happy enough upgrading to 4 GB.

I have 2gb ram on my media center,server and my laptop.

But on my Gaming computer i have 4GB, running vista x64, so I am planning a 8GB upgrade, but i'm still afraid of problems with 32-bit games. Now if they would only release a 64-bit version of hl2/tf2. :D

I believe the Source engine (and therefore the majority (perhaps all?) is 64-bit if the hardware supports it, so you'll be fine.

Grand Master

Pupik

Posted
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Got two sticks of 1gb (800mhz) and never saw Aero transparency reactivated longer than one second after a heavy game on memory. It usually almost instantly shows up with a small glitch (the language selection at taskbar stays nontransparent), but nothing that isn't fixable after a quick refresh. So yeah, I don't have any issues that bothers me with the amount of memory on my PC, so I'm all happy.

And so far, my good ol' [email protected], 2600XT and Abit IB9 mother board with on board sound, do a great job at keeping me from upgrading and still run everything, at very acceptable frame rates and speeds.

Grand Master

Elliot B.

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I've seen a computer manage wonderfully with 2GB RAM and Aero. It also has 512MB RAM on the graphics card. I always thought that in Vista it was the graphics card that was responsible for dealing with Aero...

I have a 320 MB 8800 GTS.

Collaborator

EvilDMT

Posted
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Yes, it it. But I'm not using Vista...

I currently have 4gb of RAM, perfect for Vista.. If you are using XP then 2gig of RAM seems to be the sweet spot. But if your using VISTA definetly 4gig of ram. Maybe even later 8gb of RAM might be the sweet spot.

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morphen

Posted
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2 GB isn't ideal for such modern games at high resolutions at such high detail levels. I'm happy enough upgrading to 4 GB.

I believe the Source engine (and therefore the majority (perhaps all?) is 64-bit if the hardware supports it, so you'll be fine.

I've read so, but in the task manager it says hl2.exe*32 :p

Been trying to find information about the 64-bit version, but... all info is from 2005-early 2006.

And it's all about problems with the AI acting wierd.

Well, for XP, 2gb should be enough, although, i prefer 4gb anyway if i'm to play games on the computer.

But Vista has shown that it's faster and more slick the more memory you have, due to superfetch/prefetch pre-loading

many of programs into RAM. RAM is cheap today, so my thoughts are; the more the merrier ;)

Mentor

morphen

Posted
Posted
It takes 20 seconds to redraw Aero in Vista after playing games such as Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Crysis for an hour or two and I always take that as a sign that I need more RAM.

I don't believe this is down to the amount of memory installed. I would update the GPU drivers,chipset drivers and so on.

Also; what other software is running in the background?

If none of that worked -> reinstall the who chebang.

Grand Master

Elliot B.

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  • Author
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I don't believe this is down to the amount of memory installed. I would update the GPU drivers,chipset drivers and so on.

Also; what other software is running in the background?

If none of that worked -> reinstall the who chebang.

My system is working flawlessly. It is 100% not a software issue :)

I've read so, but in the task manager it says hl2.exe*32 :p

Been trying to find information about the 64-bit version, but... all info is from 2005-early 2006.

And it's all about problems with the AI acting wierd.

From the Half-Life 2 Wikipedia page:

On December 22, 2005, Valve released a 64-bit version of the Source game engine that takes advantage of AMD64 processor-based systems running a 64-bit version of Windows. This update, delivered via Steam, enabled Half-Life 2 and other Source-based games to run natively on 64bit processors, bypassing the 32-bit compatibility layer. Gabe Newell, one of the founders of Valve, stated that this is "an important step in the evolution of our game content and tools," and that the game benefits greatly from the update. The response to the release varied: some users reported huge performance boosts, while technology site Techgage found several stability issues and no notable frame rate improvement.
Grand Master

majortom1981

Posted
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I have 2 gigs ram with home premium 32 bit, 7900 gs video card and a core 2 duo and no problems. I run media center and record tv shows with it and play games like serious sam 2 with no problems.

I felt adding a second hdd and putting the vista pagefile and other associated files on the second hdd made a better speed increase then the extra ram would have.

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