Thinking of Upgrading Memory

Trying to decide if it would be worth the money to upgrade the memory on my 6 year old computer.

I currently have 2 gigs of Mushkin PC2-6400U DDR2-800 ram and an ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series video card.

I'm trying to decide if I should get 4 more gigs from the same manufacture and have 6 gigs or if I should get 8 gigs and currently replace the whole shebang.

I'm using an Asus M2N32-SLI Motherboard with an AIMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core running at 2.6GHz and can currently run full ultra mode without major lag in normal play but need to set everything to minimum when I dual box. any suggestions on the memory?

Very first question - what OS are you running?

If it's Windows XP, or the 32 bit editions of Vista or Windows 7, you functionally can't use more than 3 Gb.

See my Guides and Tutorials

I'm running the 32 bit version of Windows 7 Professional, and until I find a new job, replacing the MB and CPU is a bit out of my price range, I'm just trying to give myself a little boost for about a half a year until I have the funds to redo the whole system.

Didn't know that more memory would be a waste with the 32 bit operating system, this article seems to suggest otherwise (3 gigs per 32 bit process so 3GB per game instance if running two instances of COH?)

No, as per that article it's 2GB per process (not processor, process is another way to say program) due to the magic of virtual memory but the limit of physical system memory is still 4GB in 32-bit XP.

The 3GB figure is geared more toward database software and systems without memory address hogging video cards and requires the program to be "built" to detect that extra GB of space.

Simplified background info. In Windows every program thinks it can use up to 2GB of memory. The computer doesn't need to have 2GB of actual physical memory for every program running because if it runs out of actual memory it will move a chunk what's in memory that hadn't been looked at "recently" to the hard drive and assign the newly available chunk to the program that needed more memory. The chunk could even come from memory the program was already using, just not recently.

As for physical memory limits, 32-bits is used to address 4GB of memory space. But all of it can't be used by programs because some of those addresses are used by devices in your computer like the hard drive controller and the video card (which can use a very large amount). Also the computer's BIOS takes some of those addresses. Once you subtract all those reserved addresses for devices and the like, a PC running 32-bit windows with 4GB of physical memory will only have around 3GB left for use by programs.

Sorry for the excessive background.

No problem Father, the info helps. Do you think spending $50 will improve my performance, currently my system uses about half it's available ram on system processes, which makes sense with what you just said. so wouldn't doubling my memory to 4 gigs give me more for the game at least until I have the funds to replace the whole aging system?

What it would do is smooth out the game's frame rate if it's being affected by the need to move chunks of memory on and off the hard drive. This is more of a problem in zones or outside missions since most inside missions don't really reference a lot of memory (you don't have an entire zone to render, the game only has to reserve memory for teammates than every random player you run across in a zone as well as usually one or two critter groups in mission versus all the ones in a zone, etc). More memory can also improve zoning times.

In your current circumstance I would make sure that when you play the game, that you aren't running any other programs like the browser, the NCSoft Launcher, Steam, "helpful" utilities that stick an icon in the notification area (little icons on the right side of the task bar), etc. in the background. Maximize your physical memory before running the game. The OS will swap out memory being used by services that are simply waiting around for something to happen or the memory chunk that's being used for a disk cache.

Think of an Operating System (OS) like a person at a daycare center makes sure that every toddler who wants to play with a new toy gets a chance and make sure nobody hogs it. Programs believe they have exclusive access to all the hardware resources in your computer including run time on a core, memory, the display,hard drive use, etc. The OS's job to insure that those resources are shared fairly and in a way that maintains the illusion of exclusiveness to the program. This usually works because all the software running isn't trying to use the same set of resources at the exact same time.

This comes up all the time.

So, I ran my older C2D E6600 system for a few hours with 4GB of ram ran on several iTirials with 24 people ran TFs and missions and checked zoning times.

I then yanked out 2GB of ram and did the same thing (Trials, TFs, missions, etc). The zoning times were exactly the same.

If you have lots of bloatware running, you should be working to get rid of that. I understand you are working on a budget so its best to spend what you have as wisely as possible and sinking $ into a 6 year old system is a waste.

Just my 02 INF.

I can't quantify anything, but the game does feel more stable with >2Gb of ram. Taking into consideration that XP uses something like 512Mb-768Mb on its own and the game can easily nab 1.5Gb now a days. If anything it'll give your system some breathing room even if it's stuck using 3.0Gb-3.5Gb of the 4Gb physical.

Just a quick update, I decided to spend $30 on another 2 gb of memory. It arrived yesterday and I can now run two instances of CoH without turning down my graphic settings so I consider it a wise investment. This should keep me going into the new year when I should have enough saved up to replace the whole system.

Cool.