Small Upgrade

[venney]

Hey everyone.
I have decided to give my computer a little upgrade.
Along with the clean install I’m going to do I’m going to add another 2gig of ram into the system.
I bought the same ram as I have installed at the moment, http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =MY-072-OC.

I also bought 2 new fans. One more side fan, and one more top fan. To be honest, I’m not even sure if I need them. My cpu rarely reaches 40, but I did buy a nice case with lots of room for fans, so

The good news also is that I am able to install one more fan, on the back of the mobo behind the cpu, but it has to be an 80 x 80 x 15, and I don’t know if I really need it. What do you recon?

So I will now have as much ram as XP will allow with added cooling and all for less than £30

[liljim]

Once you get the ram in, let me know if your still able to run the same clock speeds. I know we OC'd the devil out of your rig but im pretty curious as to how it acts with the extra memory.

[robbro]

venney don't you have a Q6600 like me m8? you should really get some 8500PC ram like i have got as they better for if you want to overclock. Also venney XP 32bit will only recognise 3gb any more you need XP 64bit etc. I know as i have tried them

[venney]

Hey Rob, i thought xp will see 3.25 GB of ram or even 3.5? I was well aware of this before i made the buy.
Even at 3GB i at least know i am getting all that xp has to offer. And its much easier to add another 2 gig in dual channel than have a random 1GB stick. For 20 quid i had to snap it up.
Isn't the amount of ram it will see also dependant on how much ram your GPU has? I also read that Xp does use all 4GBs, but because of the way it allocated the ram, it only shows as 3GB. I have read so many differnt things about it, i dunno what to believe.

And to be honest rob, i would love better ram, but i weighed up the price of 8500 ram, and it was around 60 pounds for 4GB vs 20 pounds to top my system up with 6400.

And the cheaper option won. I don't think i need to overclock the cpu more than 3.0GHz at the moment, the pc is running like a dream.

I don't think i am going to buy a new GPU either for this pc. Id love one, and id love Alan Wake when that's out, but unless i can get a great deal on a good GPU I'm keeping this X1950.

But don't worry, my next pc is having no money spared on it ;)

[Psymon]

You may need to upgrade your GPU eventually Venney. Alan Wake is Vista only as I'm sure you're aware so I expect it'll be a DX10 only game and this'll force you to get a new GPU.

a 32bit OS can seen 4GB - GPU memory. I think your X1950 is 512MB so that means you'll see 3.5GB of RAM max.

I think your best option is the cheaper way. it'll get you to 4GB and the performance difference compared to the more expensive stuff won't be noticeable.

Here's hoping gaming isn't completely dead by the time we get our new PCs

[robbro]

core come on Venney you got water cooling! surely you can get it to 3.2ghz at least on water. If I can get 3ghz on air you should get 3ghz+ on water much more efficiently - guess as your on a budget the 6400 ram is a good deal.You might not recognise a significant boost in performance as your processor is OC'd to 3ghz and i didnt notice any difference from 2gb to 4gb. But hey like you said its 20 quid so cant go wrong i guess . My next system i am going for a i7 quad core processor !

[venney]

Hey psymon, yea that's what I thought it was going to come out like!

And as for gaming, my x1950 still holds itself pretty well, I can play new games but they just don't look too snazzy.

I'M beginning to think I may just wait for the next pc to play Alan wake, I'm willing to make a partition for vista and wack Alan Wake on that, but like u say, if its vista only if that's equal to DX10 then there's no point at all.

Isn't the 360 only dx9? And wake is on that.

I would like to push my system a bit further, its at 3.0 and running at 37c, I think the highest I've seen it climb is 45/47 something like that, which is really never gets too.

Maybe when I have finished uni, I will invest in some new ram and a new gpu and see what this pc can really handle.

Thanks for both your input's

psymon, I have to agree with you on the ram, I really think for value for money they cheaper option was much more suited to me atm.

[liljim]

wasnt you running 3.3 on your cpu at one time venney?


As far as the memory, im running 4 gigs and i have a bit of a phenomena with mine. I show different amounts of memory each time i reboot. Sometimes its 3.5, sometimes 3.25, once or twice its been 3.75 all with a 1 gig vid card. It reallocated every time you boot and for me its always a toss up as to what gets allocated where. Performance hasnt changed in any of the circumstances. There is a difference in 2 and 4 gigs, nothing drastic but benchmarks a little higher.

[venney]

Yea I think we did get it to 3.3 but atm I'm running it at 3ghz. I will give everything we tried another go with the 4gig in it, see how far I can push the system. Whilst at home I don't really get enough time to mess about with everything, what little time I get is usually spent gaming

when I'm back at university I will definitely give it all another go

[Psymon]

Good point about Alan Wake being on 360. There is no DX10 capable hardware in the 360, and I doubt they'd completely re code the game on pc so it's DX10 only. therefore this is another attempt by Mirco$haft to 'encourage' people to move to vista.

the seems to have been updated a bit too. Graphics looks like farcry2.