ptgar1 Posted July 11, 2008 Share Posted July 11, 2008 Hey, sorry bout all the questions of late, but tomorrow is my big buying day (including the Saitek yoke!) Quick question about trying to keep the price down.. How important is memory? Right now the plan is to buy 4Gb (2x2Gb) of 1066 RAM ($150 or no name for like $120??) BUT could I get away with buying 4Gb of 800 OR 2Gb of 1066? please let me know your opinions.. cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bitchin Betty Posted July 11, 2008 Share Posted July 11, 2008 Purchase memory with similar speeds to your motherboard speeds. Not matching them leads to restrictions in the pipe work, not a big deal but you will loose frames in FSX by not matching them. Running excess of 3GB on a WIN XP / VISTA 32bit system is pointless. 64 bit system.... go for your life. Buy decent quality RAM for flight simulator. It is very picky. Corsair, or kingston are proven brands. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Auzy Posted July 11, 2008 Share Posted July 11, 2008 Actually, just a warning on Kingston, apparently they aren't that good. If you have a lot of money, apparently the OCZ Reapers are one of the best. But there is no good reason to get slower ram. You wont save much money, and as stated, it will slow down your computer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russ White Posted July 11, 2008 Share Posted July 11, 2008 Hey Ptgar1, RAM is very important for preventing constant hard drive paging (accessing) during game play. If you dont have enough RAM for flightsim, the texture and simulation information has to keep being accessed from the hard drive which causes stutters and pauses during game play. The more RAM you have the more data can be loaded into RAM for fast access, for flight simulation this is very important due to the huge amount of texture data used for terrain, clouds, cockpit etc. However, to use 4GB you will need a 64bit operating system to allow the whole 4GB to be addressed. As far as RAM speed is concerned, it would be better to have 4BG of 800mhz than 2GB of 1066mhz. This is because having faster access to less RAM will not make up for the pure extra capacity of a 4GB setup. If budget is an issue here, i would suggest 4GB of 800mhz. If budget is NOT an issue then of course the better choice would be 4GB of 1066mhz, as this way you get extra capacity with the extra transfer speed. It is better to try and closely match the speed of the RAM to the motherboard FSB (front side bus) you will benefit from faster, more efficient RAM access, however, using 800mhz RAM on a board with a 1066mhz FSB would not produce a noticable performance drop as far as using flight simulator is concerned. A good rule of thumb is the more RAM the better! I have 8GB of Kingston 800mhz RAM in my setup and i have no complaints at all! I went for the 800 at the time of upgrading as the 1066 stuff was new and really expensive in comparison (bear in mind i live in the UK where we pay twice as much for everything example = Petrol here is now £1.25 per litre or $2.57! not that i am bitter at all ) So, short answer.....From the options in your post, go with 4GB of 1066mhz, but make sure you have a 64bit OS! Dont be tempted by "value" RAM, you could be lucky and get stable RAM at a bargin price.....BUT, you are taking a gamble, i have worked in I.T for years now, and have had very mixed results when using value RAM. Personally i have had the best stability, reliability and performance with Kingston. OCZ is used a lot by overclockers but can be motherboard "fussy". Also beware of the heat spreaders on some OCZ specifications, as they are too big to allow 2 modules to sit next to each other! Anyway, hope this helps mate. Russ. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tennyson Posted July 11, 2008 Share Posted July 11, 2008 I am constantly amazed at the quality of the information for both hardware and software from this forum. I've been in the industry for over twenty years and thought I knew some stuff, but the amount of knowledge gleaned from this forum over the past years has been incredible. Whilst I know there are differing opinions and hardware changes there always seems to be a high level of professional knowledge here. I thank each and every fellow simmer for their contributions and congratulate you guys on making this a knowledgable, up to date reference system for FSX and computing in general. Thanx guys, Frank Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Webb Posted July 11, 2008 Share Posted July 11, 2008 Something I noticed the other day is that in my Vista Advanced Setting for my display driver, it says: Total Available Graphics Memory: 1663MB Dedicated Video Memory: 256MB System Video Memory: 0MB Shared System Memory: 1407MB I have 4GB motherboard RAM installed. So it looks like Vista (at least) is using a large chunk of my RAM to use as video memory. So 4GB might be a good amount if you're short of memory on your video card. My total memory according to Windows Task Manager is 3326MB, but my total RAM according to "Control Panel -> System" is 4GB. I don't know how to interpret that. I have a 32 bit OS, so maybe that's the problem. Hope this helps and doesn't confuse!!! Cheers, Matt. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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