- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Heyyo,
Heh, letme explain what ram prety much does.
You see, ram is a way of pre-caching things. Pre-Caching is a special system where your Cpu pages your HD to send info to your ram since ram is a heckova lot faster than your HD. Ram's something like a 4ns delay, and your HD is 1ms (I think) so that's quite the difference. So let's say you're playing a new game like UT2k4, you're running around, enemy's start to shoot at you.. your cpu then pages your HD to load the particles for their guns n' player models n' such.. oops! you don't have a lot of ram.. it clears our some ram space (takes time) and then slaps on the new info.. by then you're probably dying or dead. Now, if ya had over 1GB of ram? it wouldn't really need to clear soo much ram space now would it? it could just load it to your ramsticks elsewhere since it would have a lot of space eh? Another problem with not having enough ram is if it clears that info from your ram stick, and the game needs it again? CPU needs to page hd to send info, clear ram space, and finally put that back on. So a lack in ram, is a HUGE lack in overall preformance. Expect a lot of freezing while your CPU pages HD n' tries to get infro from your RAM in newer games. UT2k4, Tribes: Vengeance, Half-Life 2, definately Unreal 3 once that beast-of-a-game gets released.. lol, oh god I would hate to have a ram shortage on that one. :p
So? I say another stick of 256mb is aiming too low, get another stick of 512MB. You'll need all the ram you can get for newer games, n' ram's pretty cheap these days, so shop away. ;)