does ram make a big diferrence?

Discussion in 'Power Supplies and UPS's' started by stefan1988, Jul 1, 2004.

  1. stefan1988

    stefan1988 Geek Trainee

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    i heard that ram plus the virtual memory has to be equal to 1 gb but is is better to have more ram and not use the virtual memory at all does that makes a big difference in perfomance when i said perfomance i said more in the aspects of games another thing in what other aspects is ram good for besides programs like photoshop?
     
  2. Anti-Trend

    Anti-Trend Nonconformist Geek

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    Virtual memory is the bane of all things fast. Basically with virtual memory ("swap file" in OS terms), your system is using your hard drive as RAM. It's worth noting that your hard drive is the single slowest component in your system. :eek: However, you need it in order for the operating system to work properly, because that's where it dumps things from RAM which aren't being used anymore (to free up more RAM). So, in other words, more physical RAM is always better.
     
  3. Waffle

    Waffle Alpha Geek

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    does having a Raptop disk improve the speed of the swap file? I recently changed the amount from 584mb to 10gb to see what would happen, and I noticed bugger all, which i guess is down to not having enough "things" dumped on the disk.
     
  4. Anti-Trend

    Anti-Trend Nonconformist Geek

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    By "Raptop" I'm guessing you mean "Raptor", because the only Raptop I know of is a 134MHz embedded MiPS system. ;-) Yes, a faster HDD does improve the speed of your swap. A RAID-0/RAID-5 even more so. The best way to improve your system speed though is to depend on swap as little as possible.
     
  5. stefan1988

    stefan1988 Geek Trainee

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    so how much ram is enough? the sum of the virtual memory plus the ram equal to 1gb and the system needs one gb i have alot of ram but when i check it says im using like 200 out of 512 of ram does having more ram helps in this case?
     
  6. Anti-Trend

    Anti-Trend Nonconformist Geek

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    Well, nevermind your virtual memory. Unfortunately, Windows uses virtual memory whether or not your RAM is full. As far as I know there's no way to force it to use all RAM before resorting to swapfile (Linux does this by default). However, if you are just gaming and not doing anything like heavy audio/graphics/video editing, you should have plenty of memory for everyday use.
     
  7. Waffle

    Waffle Alpha Geek

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    you guessed correctly, yeah i meant Raptor. The O and R are almost close together on the keyboard...that would explain the spelling error. Only four characters. :)

    Ok thanks
     

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