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Quick RAM question..
jayparm221
Member Posts: 13
in Hardware
Hey guys, i recently got my old desktop fixed. Its a Dell Dimension 4700c that only has 512mb of RAM. I played LotRO, WoW, City of Heroes, Guild Wars. They all seem to run mediocre. Now I'm starting to get longer loads, in-game lag, etc.. So I decided to order 2 one gig memory RAM cards, so i can have 2G of RAM now. Will these RAM cards improve the lag and long loads. Btw, I play on the lowest quality possible and it does not bother me. I just want great performance and my online gaming expierence will be satisfying for me. Thanks guys.
Comments
depends....if your connection to the server is laggy...it won't help really
RAM helps in the long run...whe your systems is on for long periods or is overloaded with background apps. If you are getting lags offline....the that's more of a RAM issue
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
Idk about the connection on the server. What I do know is that I have a pretty fast connection when i browse the internet (although I probably can't compare surfing the net to an mmo). But I was told that 512mb is way to low to have to run an MMO. Server lag doesn't make it load slower, does it? Because the people i played with were loading quicker than me.
If you want to tell whether more memory will help with a game, try loading everything you would normally load except for the game and see how much memory your computer is using. Then load the game and play for a while and see how much memory the game is using. Add the two numbers together and if they're close to or greater than the amount of memory your computer has, then you need more memory.
If you're using Windows and don't know how much memory you're using, you can press Ctrl+Alt+Del and then select the option to start Task Manager. The performance tab will show how much physical memory you're using, and the processes tab will show how much memory each particular program uses.
The problem with running out of memory is that your computer will have to use hard drive space as additional "virtual memory" in order to have enough memory. Your hard drive is much, much slower than actual physical memory, so this causes the computer to run slowly. If you ran out of memory and couldn't use virtual memory, the computer would crash.
Memory is basically an issue of either you have enough (to avoid paging to the hard drive) or you don't. If you have enough, then having twice as much wouldn't make a bit of difference. If you don't have enough, things run really slowly.
Realistically, 512 MB isn't enough for any relatively recent games. As I recall, WoW generally used about 500 MB by itself, and Guild Wars about 400 MB. I haven't played the other games you mention, but I'd be surprised if LotRO used less than Guild Wars and WoW, as it was released a couple of years later.
If you have 512 MB of physical memory and a game wants 500 MB of memory, that doesn't mean the game gets 500 MB. My guess is that you're using Windows XP, which generally needs about 100 MB by itself. If you have other software running (e.g., anti-virus, or reading things in a browser), those use up memory, too.
If you're using Vista, you'll notice a huge difference from having more memory. Vista needs about 500 MB by itself, and will take nearly 1 GB if you let it, though a good chunk of that can be pushed into paging to the hard drive without losing too much performance.
Realistically, you'll probably see huge improvements in the performance of all of those games from upgrading to 2 GB of memory. You'd probably see almost exactly the same improvements had you only upgraded to 1 GB of memory.
Quizzical, thanks alot. You're post helped me alot. I'm gonna try to do the task manager thing in a minute. But the only reason i ordered two gigs was because I was going to go to bestbuy and get just a 1g card of RAM. The price was 54.99. My friend in school said i was getting ripped off so he got me a deal online that gives you two 1g cards of RAM for 30 bucks. My computer has two slots right now anyway. One has 512mb and the other is empty. So I figured i would replace the 512mb with 1g and throw the other 1g into the empty slot. It wouldn't hurt to have 2g instead of 1g so thats what I did.
The difference between 512mb to 2gigs should have a noticeable difference as most common MMOs generally use ~1 to 2gigs. I think Warhammer Online used around 1.5 or so. So you will see an increase in performance. Where RAM comes into play is when swapping starts happening when memory needs to be allocated but there is none to allocate. Either your OS will remove old memory allocations and place it with new memory allocations (unlikely scenario) or will start to play it in virtual memory (likely scenario).
Virtual memory is basically the same as RAM except its placed on your hard drive. The differences are physical memory has access times in nanoseconds (1x10^(-9) or 0.000000001 seconds) and virtual memory access times are in microseconds (1x10^(-6) or 0.000001 seconds) so physical memory can access a single bit of data 1000 times before virtual memory can access that single bit once. So you can see why if you do not have enough physical memory, it can lead to slow access times of virtual memory which leads to poor performance. Of course, this only happens when you do not have enough memory. If you have enough, adding more memory will do nothing to help.
All in all, memory is the cheapest way to increase performance in a system and going from 1gigs to 2gigs (especially from .5 gigs to 2gigs) should yield a performance boost in most modern games.
I hope this helps.
MMOs Played: I can no longer list them all in the 500 character limit.
So the only way the computer will go to virtual memory is if i dont have enough RAM memory to run the game? Also.. everytime the game gets really slow to where i have to exit, a little caution, triangular, yellow sign comes at the bottom right corner of my screen (the programs running). and it says..
"Windows - Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low"
I'm guessing this is a RAM problem and its using too much virtual memory?
Not exactly, most OS's use virtual memory constantly for small footprint programs and tasks running in the background. A lot of the background tasks that Windows normally runs will most likely be in virtual memory as maybe those memory locations only need to be accessed a few times over the course of the program or the amount of data needed to be accessed is small. This allows for critical, fast access memory for applications that the user (thats you) are running, like games, an internet brower, or word process program.
You can technically turn off virtual memory but you will not see much of a performance boost as Windows tasks generally are small compared to applications. But in your case, you just need to know what your highest possible usage of memory you would use and buy RAM up to that point. Like what Quizzical said, you can just check your task manager after opening up a number of programs and see what is in use. But a general rule of thumb for today is 2gigs. So I believe your making the right move.
MMOs Played: I can no longer list them all in the 500 character limit.
The virtual memory minimum error message is saying that your virtual memory space allocation size is too small. You might need to either check what options you have for your virtual memory. Normally allowing Windows to allocate size is a safe bet. You might also check to see how much free space you have on your hard drive as maybe you do not have much space left on the hard drive and your virtual memory is wanting to use more space that what is allowed on your hard drive.
Also having a small amount of physical memory will do this as the default virtual memory setting is 1.5 times your physical memory so 512 x 1.5 = 768 + 512 = 1280. So basically your system has 1.2 gigs of memory and 512 of it is physical memory (that is for a default setting for Windows I think). So you might be trying to use more than 1.28 gigs of memory and it is giving you an error. Getting more physical memory should definitally alleviate this problem.
MMOs Played: I can no longer list them all in the 500 character limit.
Ok i did the task manager thing. When i run the normal stuff i usually run when not in-game, it comes out to around 250 PF usage. When i run the game by itself, it comes out to around 890 PF usage. I'm guessing thats a big difference and more than my RAM can handle so its going to the virtual memory. So the Ram upgrade should fix the problem?
Yes, upping the memory size in your system should produce an increase in performance and also should fix the low virtual memory error during normal usage.
MMOs Played: I can no longer list them all in the 500 character limit.
Ok thanks so much Quizzical and Zyllos. You guys helped me alot today. I'll be sure to make sure that i come back here if i have any problems. Thanks again!
If you get that message, it doesn't merely mean that you're using some virtual memory. It means you're using quite a lot of virtual memory.
By default, Windows will allocate a certain amount of hard drive space for virtual memory. I'm not sure what it is, but it means it's not available for normal hard drive storage. If the programs you're running use enough virtual memory to go over that, then Windows will have to address more hard drive space as virtual memory. It takes some time to do that, which is why it gave you the error message.
Having a page file for some virtual memory isn't necessarily a bad thing. There are some program things that need to be addressed by the operating system as in memory, but are accessed so little that it doesn't particularly matter if they're in real memory or virtual memory. Windows may put such things in virtual memory by default just to free up physical memory for more important functions. The problem comes if programs want something put in physical memory and Windows says, sorry, there isn't room, and shoves them off into virtual memory.
I've run both Guild Wars and WoW with 768 MB of memory. That is enough for both games, though it is cutting it rather tight. My guess based on release dates is that it would also be (barely) enough for City of Heroes but not enough for LotRO.
Upgrading to 2 GB was probably the best thing for you to do, though. Presumably the games you play now aren't the last ones you'll ever play on your computer. Future games that you play (even if already released) will likely need more memory. While memory is fairly easy to upgrade, you don't want to upgrade it just a little bit at a time--and if you're having to remove smaller memory modules to put in bigger ones every time, that can be quite a waste.
The reason I say 2 GB was only "probably" the best thing for you is that it depends on how much longer you're going to keep that computer. If you're going to replace it in a month, upgrading it now is kind of a waste. The intended useful life of a personal computer is about 4-5 years, and upgrading a machine near the end of that is a waste. For the cost of all the upgrades you'd need to modernize various components, you might as well just get a whole new computer. If you upgrade some components and not others, you run a serious risk that the others will break.
Upgrading memory should allow you to have smoother game play. This is a bandaid fix and temporay because your processor and vid card are falling behind the demands of these games.
When I build a system, I max the memory speed for the mother board and memory size for the operating system. The biggest problem with many of these off the shelf systems is the cheap nature of the parts.
The default configs almost always come with just under the minimum amount of ram to run smoothly too, such bullshit cuz a $10 price hike to put in an actual usable amount of ram would make everything run much more smoothly but most people don't know and go with the base config.
Most games aren't that processor intensive. Usually memory and the video card are the limiting factors in what games you can play.