That would be a good comparison, as well as an equal timing of both.

I have a 2 x 1024M setup at 2-3-2-5 timings (was only $230 for the pair, and have seen some for $200) so this timing seems to be an excellent bang-per-buck and completely improved my gameplay as well in FEAR and BattleField 2. Future games will probably need more as complexity increases so it is well worth the $ spent since I am a gamer.

I had 512 * 2 and i bought a 2*1.
is it worth the money?

"Most PC enthusiasts however really don't need 2 Gb."


...then does that even qualify them as being enthusiasts? I would say most normal - advanced pc users would be well of with 1GB, however enthusiasts would be the ones wanting more than that.

By the way, why was Quake4 ONLY run @ High Quality?
Run Quake4 @ Ultra settings & you'll see a 1GB system practically freeze

This review should have been named
"Can I get by on only 1GB of RAM?"

Mallissin makes a very good point. More RAM will only noticably improve the speed of a computer if there previously was not enough RAM available and data that should've been stored in RAM was paging.

If you really wanted to explore performance increases, you should've been working with applications that require more than 1 gig of memory and show the performance increase.

You don't increase your RAM to speed up useable apps, you increase your RAM to use apps that NEEDED more RAM than you had.

I'm sorry to seem hostile, but the article is testing something out of context and without proper variations of use to prove the point.

Most games all run the same way. Content (textures,geometry files, etc.) is loaded to RAM so they can be passed to the video card quickly for rendering. This does NOT STRESS THE RAM and actually makes a point for adding MORE RAM, since more content is always preffered and having as much of it in quickly accessible storage a big plus. Most games hard code their engines with set static limits to the amount of RAM used, and this is not always variable. Once more game companies begin using multi-resolution compression on content, RAM will become extremely important and in large quantities. The multi-resolution will require more variable caching for the video card and data to be available for parsing by the processor.

Video editting applications are the complete opposite. There is too much content to be loaded to RAM, so while you're working most of the data is cached to hard drive, making the case for a fast hard drive array and not more RAM. More of the cache can be moved to RAM though letting the user move through the data faster if more is available. I'm not sure how Adobe Premire was tested, since I don't see a description, but I'm willing to bet the test was using a small set of data which is also not very helpful. The spot on Photoshop also annoyed me, since it *IS* typically professionals who use this program, and the reviewer clearly ignores this fact.

Compression benchmarks don't help at all either, since most use streams that depends more on how fast the processor can do it's job than anything else.

The only benchmark that I thought would show the benifits of more RAM was the 3-D content creation, using 3DS Max 7. Anyone who has used MAX knows RAM is extremely important, and that is because most CAD programs use vector data. If more of this vector data is thrown into RAM, screen refreshing is much smoother because the processor can run it's calculations without paging to disk. Microstation, AutoCAD, and nearly any other CAD program all run the exact same way. The fact this benchmark showed no gains, made me the most annoyed because I work with Architects and 3D artists, making my living from making sure they can work quickly.

I really believe the reviewer should have threated the RAM more like a hard drive. They should have thrown different sets of data at each program and showed the results. I believe from experience that the data produced from this sort of benchmarking would clearly make the case for MORE RAM.

Adobe premier pro 1.0 rendering tested with both 1Gb and 2Gb of RAM, rendering ca 30 minutes, no difference.

First off if you want to play games get a $500 Xbox 360 and save a LOT of money. Second computers were not invented to play games so take games out of the test and 2 gigs of ram is a total waste. Any current day "cumputer" runs fine on 1 gig. I.M.H.O

OMG saying computer weren't built to play games is like saying your body wasn't built to walk. The whole point to computers is to help us with working and to entertain us. Its called evolution deal with it. The very first personal computers had games for them.

And I have almost all game consoles and the one I use the most is my Computer, you can play basically any game from any console on it and they dont come out with "Computer 2" or "Computer X" I never have to buy a whole new system and rarely have to update it.

Back to the topic though, for gaming 2GB is good, 4GB is awesome. If your sole purpose for ur PC is working on files at home you can get away with 1GB maybe even 512MB.

lets think about this for a second. How well does your computer run when using the swap file (hard drive). Now using a jump drive from a medium that's even slower than your hard drive... well figure it out.