I am happy with my duron 700mhz and 512mb sdram pc133 on my old computer running xp pro. However my son has an athlon64 3200 and 1.5 gigs of ddr400 and he is asking me to buy him more ram. He plays dungeons and dragons a lot and thinks more ram will help. His machine came with 512mb and I already bought him one gig. He has a good video card--gt7300. I have a problem thinking more ram will help him in game playing since I am happy with my 1/2 gig of sdram. Would 2, 3 or even 4 gigs of ram help him play better or not? I just bought him a new mb and a new antec 500 watt ps. His emachine mb died at only 1 1/2 yrs of age. Since I am still in the upgrade buying mode I thought I would ask about more ram, however I do not want to waste money. Is there such a thing as too much ram? I can fit 4 gigs into 4 slots on the new gigabyte board. I bought this 939 socket board mainly because it has 4 slots and onboard video. 4 slots is hard to find in a 939 socket board. Should I fill them to the max?

Whats going on with his computer for him to ask for more ram. Is the game not playing correctly?

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but I think most MoBo's only support max 4gigs.....unless you have a 64bit board.

The max is defined by two things:

a. The motherboard.

b. The operating system.

http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm

Louis

I believe the max available is 3GB unless it is 64bit. You can put 4GB in a 32-bit system but it will not see the last 3/4 GB or so.

More memory would help your son and with the cost of memory these days, it is the number 1 most cost-effective thing you can do for your computer.

It's hard to say how much it will really help as there may be other things slowing him down. How much memory on the video board? 256MB is a minimum and 512 is even better, for gaming.

Good luck.

DR

depending on the issue... I would say that going to 2Gb "even" will probably give a slight but noticeable boost. The one question I have is: Is he using the onboard video for his graphics acceleration? If this is the case, then my suggestion would be to get a decent GPU. It'll take a lot of the load off the system and will probably result in a better boost in gaming performance than an exra 512 Mb of RAM. Not to mention, he'll be able to turn on more of the "bells and whistles" graphically.

*edit* Incidentally: Yes, there is such a thing as too much RAM. I have installed too much RAM on a machine before and it went straight to BSOD. (this was a few years ago so if it's not the case anymore plz let me know)

hm that wouldnt so much be to much ram, more incompatible ram

if you are going to spend money - spend it on a videocard oppose to ram. i think that the vid card is the bottleneck at the moment...and you will get a much bigger performance increase from a new vid card oppose to more ram.

regarding ram...i would buy another 512stick to take it up to 2gb - then thats bout as far as you want to go (with x86 anyway)..

How about if we start with some specs first so that we know what we are really dealing with. What is the make and model of this computer, is the graphics card stock? If this is a custom build what make and model is the motherboard, graphics card, PSU, and RAM.

If this is a newer machine which allows dual channel RAM you may want to look at duplicating this one gig module and running the two in dual channel, twice as fast ain't bad.

Edit: Remember that dual channel memory must have the exact same specs.

This was a year old emachine but is now custom since I had to buy a new motherboard for it.

Board Biostar GeForce 6100-M9
ram 2 sticks of 256mb and 2 sticks of Cosair 512's total ram - 1.5 gigs of DDR400
video card Evga e- GeForce 7600GT
processor Athlon64 3200 socket 939
psu Antec Earthwatts 500 watt
OS XP Home

My son thinks that more ram will improve his game playing. He has no major complaints. He simply thinks that more ram is always better. I would like to know for sure if more ram will do any good. Perhaps a better video card is a great idea. Or perhaps saving for a better motherboard that will take DDR2 and an AM2 socket is the best bet. I bought the Biostar 6100-M9 because I could use his existing processor and ram and it is working fine. I just wanted to know the point of no performance gain on an x86 Xp machine. My personel computers are 10+ years old and one has 512mb sdram and the other has only 256mb and they do the job. I even have a spare machine with only 128mb sdram and a celeron processor and it works for basic tasks. All my machines run XP Pro. I can tell you for a fact that 128mb is a minimum. I can see clearly the performance gain going from 128mb to 256mb to 512mb in each machine. But when you are at 1.5 gigs on my son's machine do you really need more?

What game is he playing?

Dungeons and Dragons

reccomended is just a gig so he won't notice much improvement by adding more

Thanks for all the replies.