Actually....

Depending on your system, it may adversely affect performance, both in Vista and XP...

There is a RAM specification called the Command Rate. Normally it is set to 1T. However, when you add 2 more sticks in, it will set to 2T. If you have an Intel processor its not quite as big of a deal....but for AMD systems it can be, and can make a difference of 15% (I've read up to 30% in some games). Basically this is the amount of time it takes from when a RAM chip is selected, to the amount of time it can process the command. AMD has always benefitted less from actual RAM throughput (FSB) than it has from better timings (RAS, CAS, etc). Intel is opposite, you are better off upping your FSB and loosening your timings a bit, which is why the command rate affects it less. This is still true of the Core 2 Duo.

This also affects people that may have had 1GB RAM (2x512MB) and upgraded to 2GB by adding two more 512MB sticks....its actually better to remove the 512's and replace them with 2x1GB.

Currently I have not enountered any dual channel 4GB kits (2x2GB) that have decent timings and a 1T command rate....tho they may already be out there.

I have 1.5g corsair ram in mine, would I see much improvement going to 2G?

Mushkin has a 4 gig kit (2x 2 gig sticks) that's CAS 4, runs at 4-3-3-10 timings, but I can't find the command rate listed anyplace.

Yeah they also have 2x2GB PC-8500 (runs at 1066FSB) that goes at 5-4-4-12, but again dont list the command rate.

According to Bjorn3d.com both the PC-6400 and 8500 run at 2T command rate...

If all you are running is SH4, you should not be swapping to disk and would not gain much if anything.
SH4 on XP Pro uses ~1.2

Oh man I am getting a headache!;)

If my MB runs at fsb 266 and supports 2 gig of ddr ram, Can I put 2 gig of PC 3200 in it?

Right now I have 1 gig of PC 2100 (266 fsb).

I cant find 1 gig sticks of pc 2100 that come with a decent price.

very few current games ever require more than 1 gig and currently over 2 gigs for games would probably be a waste. There was a test of this on SIMHQ a while back:

http://www.simhq.com/forum/ubbthread...e=1#Post124711

Yes. DDR-400 (PC-3200) is backward compatible with DDR-333 and 266. However, DDR2 is not compatible with DDR.

Kewl!:D

Thanks Zantham.

I did that a while back. It was an advance purchase on my upgrade. I bought PC3200 ram, used it in the PC2100 application, then just moved it over to the new board once I got it. In this case you can't do that, because everything is moving towards DDR-2, which has a different slot configuration, but it works just fine. The D in SD-RAM stands for Dynamic; it'll slow down if you plug it into a slot that doesn't run at the memory's full capable speed.

Recently I went and picked up 3GB of DDR2 RAM and was going to make a post about how much I recommend more RAM, and POOF!!!, there was a post about it already here! :cool:

Well I used to hate this game but I was trying to run it on my old system which was an AMD XP 2400+ with 1.5 gigs of PC3200 ram and an Evga 6600GT AGP video card. It sucked big time. I would get maybe 10 fps in port with medium/low settings in the game.:roll:

I upgraded to a Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4 motherboard. An AMD 64 X2 (dual core) 4600 2.4ghz processor. 2 gigs of PC6400 Dual Channel ram (running at 800mhz) and one Evga 7900 GS KO video card. Wow! I get 35 fps in port the all the settings maxed out. Unbelieveable! It looks so nice....Now I love this game.:D

Cost me approx $450.00 and man was it worth it.

Oops, almost forgot to say.....it also runs FEAR on maximum settings and
Stalker on high settings with no lag.....

Not true
 

32 bit Xp Pro can only address 2.75 GB RAM, only the 64 bit edition can handle more memory and then it can be unreliable above 4gb.

I've played this game on my system with 1 GB and 2 GB, two different brands of memory, and my Core2 E6600 clocked as low as 2.4 GHz to as high as 3.6 GHz.

I can say without hesitation that 1.) going to 2 GB from one gig certainly has a noticable effect, as stated earlier since it is using ~1.2 GB. But, if you have really fast hard disks, the time lost to swapping is negligible (I have four SATA Hitachi 7K80s in a RAID-0 stripe, which is pretty insane but it's mighty fast.)

2.) CPU MHz is everything. Upgrade your CPU to the fastest your board supports, buy a new cooler and overclock until your house burns down, do what you have to do to get that CPU MHz as high as possible with the most modern CPU you can possibly work with. Of course if you OC be prepared to blow something up and replace multiple parts if necessary, but depending on the CPU you can get +200 MHz to +1 GHz without too much effort.

If you're curious how good your CPU is for this game, run SuperPi. If you can do 1M in < 18 seconds, you're doing well. >30, start OCing or bust out that credit card.

A better test, in SH4 just go to the map in Career near your home base, start moving and multiply time until the clock hand starts to lag and move in a choppy fashion. If your clock hand still moves smooth over 4096x then you're doing pretty well. If it's still perfectly smooth at 6000x+ then you're doing great. If it's perfectly smooth at 8192x for any reasonable length of time, then you've beaten me and you're doing phenominally. If it lags at 2048x then your system is probably old. Note that this depends somewhat on the amount of traffic, if there are multiple ships nearby it's going to lag much earlier. Get a little bit of distance from Pearl so friendly traffic is mostly gone and test from there.

3.) Video does help but primarily if all the effects are cranked up.

Hard to compare Stalker to this game. I've done a lot of tweaking work for Stalker and SH4 - the big difference was that CPU MHz affect SH4 most, while graphic card overclocking was the most noticable boost for Stalker. I'm also playing Stalker with settings cranked and getting 70 FPS nearly everywhere, but I had to OC the 8800 GTS card to 630 MHz to get it to really smooth out. Yet this had little noticable effect on SH4.