I would be interested to see exactly what the performance is with 2GB ram for battlefield 2. That game seems to love RAM.

well i got an AMD 64 3700 my Board is a AsRock 939Dual-SATA2 and when i had 4 512's of 3200 in here i thought it ran ok but then i took out 2 of them down size to 1 gig it ran alot better for me in my gaming weird? not sure but all i know it ran faster using 2 sticks than the 4 in here.

SO, I'm quite glad to see that you've addressed gaming...but astounded that you've done no testing with Battlefield 2.

The gaming community is well aware of the significant response of this memory-hungry game to additional memory. Players moving from 1GB to 2GB report better framerates, better stability, fewer in-game glitches, pauses, and improved performance overall -- even when using 4x512MB.

Being a skeptic, I doubted that another GB would make any difference. After all, everyone knows that 1GB is where the gains level out, right? Then, I added two more 512MB sticks to my Asus A8V / AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 / ATI X800 system. The difference is striking.

In order for your report (as good as it is) to really address the impact of RAM on gaming, you ought to go back and repeat your testing with BF2 under various conditions. I think you'll see something very different from the three games you've included in the article to date.

Does the test system have a dual-core cpu?

dual-core is here and it is the future...

i have 2 gigs of ram and i play games, but what made me switch to 2 gigs was simply the fact that windows x64 behaves like windows x32 with 512 mg of ram. with windows x64 and 2 gigs of ram, you're pretty much unstoppable (until you run into 16-bit code!)

Important to know about the 2 vs 4 dimm speed issues

No word about memory fragmentation & trashing. How about handling an 8GB *.tif ? Should I downgrade from 64GB to 2GB ? Or should I use a Maxtor SATA instead of a 40GB RAM drive ?

Can I just say that whilst I can see the merits of running both kits of memory at the same timings - for variable elimination purposes, I feel it is unrealistic. A majority of those in the enthusiast group would undoubtedly two sticks of low latency DDR400 - that XMS-3200XL is a prime example. That ram is intended to run at 2-2-2-5.
The real question for enthusiasts should be whether running 2 gig of ram, whilst sacrificing timings is overall better than running 1 gig of ram at tighter timings.

Firstly I do not take much notice of reviews. Just one person's opinion.
Secondly I take even less notice of reviews in mags that carry paid advertisements for what they are reviewing.
I don't know what mag this review was in. I was just sent an URL for the one article.
I am useing 4 gigs of ram. I don't need all that, but I WANTED it.I know that I am getting the best performance. No worries about running out of memory or useing a swap file.

Very informative. It puts some myths to rest and reinforces others.

What about the softwares like BEA WebLogic or the Team Foundation Servers which require min of 2 GB RAM

No one runs just one application, so a benchmark for a game or some other application is not worth much. Gaming is important to some people but what if you want to watch TV with dual monitors and have e-mail running and then you have an IM program running while you are searching for something on the web?

Some people may have several documents open in Word, have Excel running with a document and be accessing a database through a client. At the same time they may be connected to the mainframe and have a groupware program like Lotus Notes running.

I looked at your test results and I dont think a few frames per second are worth worrying about. Now if you were running photoshop and you were measuring how long it took to open a project with large file sizes that might have some bearing on the subject. Another area might be the time it takes to open a webpage with large images where the key factor is just opening an image file or loading a large map in a game.

pleas think about users of operationsystems that make much better use of your system memory (like bsd*, linux, ...).

more ram == faster!
even 2GB are not too much...

Interesting article guys,but i think you should have included a PC equipped with 512 Mb of RAM(Either 1x512Mb or 2x256Mb).Besides,as U said,most PCs today are equipped with 512 (Like me :P) or 1GB of RAM.If you showd us the difference in performance between 512MB and 1GB of RAM,maybe we could at last be convinced to install another 512Mb module! :)

This entire article is a waste of damn time.

NO BF2 benchmarks?!! That game more than any other in the PC gaming market demands 2 gig of ram for optimal performance and it alone will increase ram sales.

4 GB of RAM: Do We Really Need That Much?

Alot of 'enthusiast' users will be running their ram faster than advertised i.e. 250Mhz not 200 etc. Now do 2x1gb and 4x512Mb compare for this purpose?

Crucial Memory is one of main sponsor of Xbitlabs.com ... We don't need more RAM but they need us to buy more.

I was evaluating to buy of 2GB (2x1 GB).
Now I will not buy the memory because it's useless.
Thanks to help me to save money

You completely forgotten to mention the virtualization applications like VMware or MS Virtual PC. I'm using a virtual network set which consists of 4 virtual PCs (2 2003 Servers and 2 XP clients) on my PC which has 2 GBs of ram and when I use this set of PCs extremely for my clients network deployments I quickly spend those 2 GBs and fall off to disk swapping. I think that we, the system builders and system admins need more memory for such environments and such virtualization tasks will be more popular with technological improvements in multicore CPU designs. But we are bound to memory limitations on such future systems. I would like to build a virtual network which could consist of 5 to 10 PCs and I need more than 4 GBs of memory for such setups. And please don't offer me an expensive server motherboard to which I could throw more than 4 GBs. I can build up a desktop system with an Athlon X2 4800 which could handle the workload of 5 to 10 virtual PCs simultaneously but I can't have the necessary memory for this setup.