Page 4 - Tests: 2gigs vs. 1gig

Originally Posted by weevilofdoom

Meh, sorry, I had a brainfart or something.

Originally Posted by infliction666

is it me or do the majority of stickies outlast their true usefulness? alot changes in last eight months and its not so much of a question these days, 2gbs is pretty much the standard...

Originally Posted by mrps2man

I'm tired of hearing people argue about games needing more than one gig of memory and having to reply that they don't and you won't notice the difference. I recently decided to run some tests and see if what I was saying is true. Here is what I did and what I got:

Method:

I ran two games for my little test: Battlefield 2, a game which is often said to take 2 gigabytes of memory and UT2K4, my favorite game, generally acknowledged to run fine on one gig of memory. I started up the system and then opened up BF2 and loaded the last map, whatever it's called, can't remember. The I noted the result and then did the same for UT2K4 on AS - Mother Ship. I played both games a little to see if there was any stuttering. Finally, rebooting was in order and so I did. Took out a gig and ran the same tests. Pretty self-explanatory.

Here are the specs of the system I used for testing:

MSI K8N NeoII Platinum
AMD Athlon64 3200+ Winchester core
Built by ATi Radeon 9800pro
2X Maxtor 160gig HDDs, RAID-0
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS
1 gigabyte/2 gigabytes of system memory, PC3200

Nothing was overclocked for these tests.

Results:

2GB System Memory:

BF2
Map loading time: 48.19S +/- 1s
No stuttering

UT2K4
Map loading time: 26.82.82s +/- 1s
No stuttering

1GB system Memory:

BF2
Map loading time: 55.41s +/- 1s
No stuttering

UT2K4
Map loading time: 31.35s +/- 1s
No stuttering

1GB system Memory, less processes:

BF2
Map loading time: 49.64s +/- 1s
No stuttering

UT2K4
Map loading time: 29.31s +/- 1s
No stuttering



Conclusion:

Well, I was right and wrong at the same time. I didn't really feel a noticeable difference, even though there was in fact one while loading the maps, up to over 7 second difference in fact. UT2004 was impacted, which surprised me. I would never have thought that a game which seemed to use less than a gig was actually affected when memory was added. Now, while doubling up on memory does produce results, you have to realize that it will hurt your overclockability as well. Also note that there was no stuttering in-game in any case and that closing memory-hogging applications like FAH made a fair difference when running a gig, almost bringing you up to par with double the memory.

If you don't mind paying two times as much on system memory for that 7 second increase when running memory hogging processes and losing overclockability then go for it. Otherwise I would suggest sticking with a gigabyte for now.

Originally Posted by theblackmages

yep hard drives mostly affects loading times, ive had a huge bump between some old 5400rpm maxtor drive and a 7200rpm 16mb cache maxtor drive, loadings are so much faster in bf2 ,more than 2times i could say.

i would prolly do some benchmarks, check the fps increase in games and encoding and stufff...