Curse

wafflesrok · Jul 28, 2006, 01:37 AM // 01:37

I have been getting mixed answers on what I should do about memory. I have had people to tell to buy to 512s and people who r telling me to buy a 1 gig. Arent they the same?????? I have heard people say bottlenecking and some terms I dont understand. If I upgrade my RAm will my games performance increase or not becuase I want to do PVP and right now it is Lagggy. I currenlty have a GAteway MX3230 with a laptop VCArd(unisomthing???) intel celron proccesor(1.5ghz) and 256 of RAM(wich i know is way to low) So if u could help me out that would be great! My laptop is meeting minimum requirments and plays the game ok(laggy and long loadtimes but its bearable) Also i cant go out and buy a new computer so please dont tell me too, i just want to increase my games playability as much as i can on my current laptop.

Woah that was a mouthful

Hysteria · Jul 28, 2006, 02:29 AM // 02:29

Im sure it would help since then your computer wont have to use the hard drive as much for virtual memory but I don't think you'll see the performance increase that you might be looking for.

Lord Centaur · Jul 28, 2006, 03:18 AM // 03:18

I had 256 on my laptop, now have 512. Belive me, it literally doubles performance. 512 is enough for me, wheras 256 was a pain for too long.

wafflesrok · Jul 28, 2006, 04:20 AM // 04:20

sweetXD

Hysteria · Jul 28, 2006, 07:08 AM // 07:08

Google your question and you'll see what Im trying to say. Will it help? Sure but your frame rates are unlikely to double due to the extra ram. For that you'll need to upgrade your cpu, graphics card, fsb speed and the memory. In my experience the thing that gave me more fps in games was upgrading my cpu.

gabrial heart · Jul 28, 2006, 04:24 PM // 16:24

Yes RAM will increase load speeds and frame lag, but no you wont get much better frame rates. You have a poor video card. If i read it right you have a laptop and upgrading the video is just not an option in most cases. Since the machine your talking about uses shared memory for the video you might see a slight frame rate improvement, but it won't be anything major. No it does not matter if you buy 2x512k chips verses 1 GB chip, but I'm pretty sure you only have one slot, so you really have no choice but to buy a 1GB chip.

sleepy samurai · Jul 29, 2006, 01:46 AM // 01:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by gabrial heart

No it does not matter if you buy 2x512k chips verses 1 GB chip, but I'm pretty sure you only have one slot, so you really have no choice but to buy a 1GB chip.

Not correct. If he has dual channel 2x 512MB sticks will yield better results then a single 1GB stick. Dual channel effectivly doubles the data being sent to the ram by routing to both sticks.

ShaDowGod · Jul 29, 2006, 02:26 AM // 02:26

I don't think his laptop is capable of using dual channel sticks. I agree that the dual channel will provide better results, but only if the laptop can handle it. Ok...now let me explain bottlenecking to you.
Bottlenecking is when you are trying to get more out of your system than what the components can handle or were designed for. It's when your trying to have more information run through it than it can handle. Think of it like this: Take a bottle of water, turn it up side down and open it. The water wants to move out of the bottle all at once, but the neck of the bottle is preventing the water from draining out of the bottle all at once. Think of the water in the bottle as being the data your computer is processing, and the bottle is the hardware in your computer. The amount of data that is being accessed is more than what your computer hardware can handle. The biggest problems that cause bottlenecking aren't enough memory, a cpu that can't handle the load, etc. Your computer when it is just running has many application running at once. Your memory (only having 256mb) is probably the bottleneck here. Because you are using a laptop, the memory is probably running windows (standard), antivirus (standard), other applications (standard), and the graphics. Most desktops have individual graphics cards which only are in control of the graphics, unlike a laptop which doesn't have a separate graphics processing unit. Games like Guild Wars require more memory to run when there isn't a separate video card, so it requires the laptop to get more memory from somewhere. Windows has a neat little feature called "Virtual Memory" in which it takes hard drive space and converts it to memory that it can run programs with. The problem with this is that it isn't as fast as RAM. Windows is adding more memory to your system, but it isn't the same as adding more memory. By adding more memory to your system, you are going to be allowing more things to run at once smoother with less lag.

I can't believe I just typed all of that...