I am thinking of upgrading my pc slightly but am stuck on if to spend more money on cpu or ram at the moment i am running an amd athlon 64bit 4000 duel core chip and for what i use the pc for (surfing and music) it is fast. I am currently running 2gb of ddr800 ram.

I cant get hold of the next chip up (amd 64bit 6000) which is the maximum my current board will take so if i moved onto the amd tripple core or quad core chips i will have to replace the main board then the ram.

So...i was thinking would i be better putting another 2gb of ram (ddr800) which would take my system ram upto 4gb the max that the board can take or would you guys go for replacing the main chip.

What i am thinking is would i see a difference taking the ram upto 4 gb rather than spending a fortune on the new amd phantom chips and just gaining a slight increase in performance.

I am aware that anymore than 4gb of ram on a 32 bit operating system is going to be the most i can take it to until i sometime get convinced to move over to 64 bit.

Just wondered what you guys think on the issue, as it seems that my bloody hard drive is making my pc slow if anything its like the cpu is saying get a move on i need more data and the hard drive hitting back saying hang on i can only go this fast lol

Cheers

Edited 23 July, 200916 yr by justinbarrow

If you are going to be running windows 7 I would recommend some more RAM in there as a faster chip with the same memory wouldn't make much difference. I currently have 3GB of available RAM and Vista uses about 53% of that when first booted up.

Phil

Cheers Phil - Lets hope windows 7 dosent use so much ram that would be a bonus.

Unless the CPU is a massive step up in terms of performance I'd say RAM.

If I'm honest, I'd probably say neither, put the money in a pot and replace the lot when you have time.

RAM mate , makes more diff than the CPU unless you make a drastic change.

Win 7 does use much less resources so Im told by a geeky mate lol who has the beta test thing

billy

My 7 is using around 1gb of RAM with MSN and Firefox open.

32bit OS's only see 3GB of RAM

..........

32bit OS's only see 3GB of RAM

Why do people always quote this, it's completely untrue!!

32bit OS see 32bit of memory, which is 4GB!

Why you only see less than 4GB of RAM is due to something called memory mapped I/O.

This lets the computer write to a memory address but to actually address a piece of hardware etc.

512MB graphics cards will take up a lot of this 32bit address space.

Almost any device in a system will also take up some of this address space.

If you want to use a 32bit OS with the full 4GB or more of RAM then you should either use PAE (under windows) or compile a linux kernel with the correct options for your memory type.

Yup! I have 4GB of RAM but due to all the other stuff in there including 768MB of graphics memory I only see 3326MB of RAM.

Seems the memory usage is different today with Utorrent, windows live messenger and internet exploder with a few tabs running. Using 41% - 1.3GB.

I think to be honest I mirror the thoughts of Cheezemonkhai though and perhaps you should put it aside and wait till you can upgrade the whole lot as that system is pretty dated by todays standards but then again it depends what you intend to use it for!

Phil