Only 1 gig mem on Extreme Gaming machine

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Thread: Only 1 gig mem on Extreme Gaming machine

  1. #1
    Expensive Sushi
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    Only 1 gig mem on Extreme Gaming machine

    How come only 1 gig of memory on the extreme gaming machine. I just upgraded from 1 gig to 2 gig on my comp and the difference is absolutely phenomenal. True there is no noticeable difference in tasks like writing this post. But playing DoAC with two accounts running in two active windows the difference is night and day. No more listening to the sound of my hard drives thrashing as they write to and from the page file system. No more waiting to zone with the grinding sound of the hard drives. No more frame rate stalls as I run across the frontiers and the hard drives start grinding away. I can zone from ToA to frontier keep out to frontiers and run clean across them and zone again and not once hear my hard drives being accessed. SWEET!!! If I'm dumping 4 grand on a new system I'd be thinking seriously about 4 gigs. Two gig would be a minimum.

  2. #2
    Hammerhead Shark adslegend's Avatar
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    There are several reasons why I wouldn't go more than 1GB RAM currently:

    1) Costs too much (then again, the extreme gaming machine does too)
    2) The games I play (as with most) won't really benefit
    3) Overclocking becomes difficult. Neither 2x1GB sticks or more than two 512MB sticks is ideal
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  3. #3
    Snarky Quorums MrDigital's Avatar
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    I doubt 2GB made that big of a difference. If you say it did, you likely have spyware issues. You're also trying to 2 copies of a game at once from the sound of it, so that may make a difference.

    Try and live like the rest of mankind for an instance, however, and realize that most of us don't play 2 copies of the same game at once.

    1GB is more than enough for ANY home gaming/productivity machine, and I challenge *anyone* to give me benchmarks (and not "but my gut tells me the big dollars I just spent made a huge improvement") to back it up.

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  4. #4
    NullPointerException rock's Avatar
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    Originally posted by MrDigital
    1GB is more than enough for ANY home gaming/productivity machine, and I challenge *anyone* to give me benchmarks (and not "but my gut tells me the big dollars I just spent made a huge improvement") to back it up.

    -MrD
    The catch there is "home" machine. I've got 1.5GB on my new A64 system and love it. My old T-bird system had 3/4 GB and was always stretched to the limit. Apps like Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc. all eat RAM for lunch. And then large datasets require lots of space too unless you want to thrash all day.

    So for home/gaming systems, even 1GB is usually overkill. But if you do real work on your box and don't want to log into loaded servers, 1GB+ is a necessity.

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  5. #5
    Great White Shark thrawn86's Avatar
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    2gigs minimum? 4 gigs?

    you've got to be joking. And i'll be darned if I can't look at my memory usage while running HL2/folding and I'm never even close to a gig.

    If you can hear your HDs thrashing around like that, you *really* need some new hard drives my friend.
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  6. #6
    Zoom-Zoom! soupnazi's Avatar
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    The majority of people don't play 2 games at one time.
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  7. #7
    Hammerhead Shark WildWeasel's Avatar
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    Originally posted by soupnazi
    The [vast, enormous, all-consuming] majority of people don't play 2 games at one time.
    Edited for clarity.
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  8. #8
    Bearded Kirklander's Avatar
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    It seems that up until Windows XP, you didn't really need more than 512 when running games. There's no doubt that XP takes up a chunk of memory for itself, and games are getting more complex, but even with that, since video cards have so much ram on them, you may not need to worry about anything more than 1 gig of system memory for a while, I would think. Plus, it works well with Dual Channel with two 512 meg modules. Guess it would make sense to jump up to 2 gig if you wanted to, but I am not sure there would be much benefit. Even Photoshop doesn't seem to use as much memory as some of these new games. Used to be that Photoshop was the biggest ram-hog I knew of. Not so much any more, I guess.

  9. #9
    Hammerhead Shark masteraleph's Avatar
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    It all relates to what you're doing with the rig. If you're gaming, any more than 2 gigs is certainly overkill, and more than one gig probably is. Since the Sharky machines are gaming PCs, no more than one gig really needed (esp since a number of people who would build such things would o/c them).

    OTOH, if you're running a web browser, email client, etc, and editing a 70 layer photoshop project, then yes, it could be an issue. Same for rendering. But since these are gaming PCs, 2 gigs aren't needed.
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  10. #10
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    In DAoC, alot of people have "bot" accounts, a second charactor to buff your main one.

    If you dont have the money for a second PC, you have to run both game clients on one pc. DAoC is a hog for resources, and having 1 gig of ram is not enough to run two clients without slowdowns/problems. Even with only ONE client running, having 512mb of memory will slow it down and lag you horrably in huge fights.

    Imagine having two instances of Doom3 running.. and you know what its like to play DAoC dual logged..
    Last edited by wildphil; 12-26-2004 at 01:54 AM.

  11. #11
    nuclear launch detected kpxgq's Avatar
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    i actually think that more than 1gb would be nice... when im not running anything in the background and then run an intensive game.. the game itself will eat up about 400-700mb of RAM.... while my 1gb of RAM is more than enough... i also notice that firefox with a alot tabs open can take up about 100mb of RAM and photoshop easily takes another 50 or so on top of the base 50-100 than windows services takes up. at this point i am getting to my limit of 1gb. OF course most gamers usually close all other programs when playing a game, but im the type who likes to multitask and having more than 1gb sounds like it could be helpful
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  12. #12
    Bearded Kirklander's Avatar
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    Seems like Maxthon is more memory efficient than Firefox. I wonder if Mozilla 1.7.5 is about the same as Firefox or maybe uses less?

    I did not know it was ethical to run multiple characters in an online game like that. Hrm...

    But hey, if 2 gigs makes ya happy, more power to ya. Heck, I could buy another Mushkin kit from Newegg for $137.50 and be up at 2 gig. But right now, I've kinda spent all that I should spend on it at this time. Maybe later.

  13. #13
    Hammerhead Shark mikeki's Avatar
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    A lot of folks that play MMORGS (DAOC, Everquest, EQ2, etc) play multiple characters on the same machine. I've run three copies of EQ on one box before. RAM definitely makes the difference there.

    However, us MMORG addicts need to add that extra cost to our machines. The rest of the gamers don't need it, and don't know what they're missing.
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  14. #14
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    MMO players would be more likely than any other gamer group to notice a difference from more than 1 GB of RAM. Some of the games have memory management issues - whether in the form of leaks or loading more stuff into RAM at one time than they should - but regardless the reason if your RAM fills up and starts the HD thrashing it will significantly detract from the experience.

  15. #15
    πr² rabidmoose171's Avatar
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    I dont think i need more than my 1GB, except when im playing eq2 i just feel like more ram could help... but the game is huge, its understandable.

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