Im a corsair man meself.. the best memory there is

got mine from a local supplier www.aria.co.uk

they do the branded stuff, but i went for the "major brand" version, saved a few quid and have never looked back......might only be packing a 1.4Ghz under the hood, but 1.5Gb of RAM (ok, it's only SDR rather than DDR) and a GeForce 3 Ti200 (which vastly outperforms all the Geforce 4's and the 5200 series cards that came after it...) and there isn't too much stuff I can't do.

An upgrade would cost serious money - we're talking from the ground up (motherboard, cpu, cooling, ram & gfx......ouch)

got mine from a local supplier www.aria.co.uk

they do the branded stuff' date=' but i went for the "major brand" version, saved a few quid and have never looked back......might only be packing a 1.4Ghz under the hood, but 1.5Gb of RAM (ok, it's only SDR rather than DDR) and a GeForce 3 Ti200 (which vastly outperforms all the Geforce 4's and the 5200 series cards that came after it...) and there isn't too much stuff I can't do.

An upgrade would cost serious money - we're talking from the ground up (motherboard, cpu, cooling, ram & gfx......ouch)[/quote']

Does it run current games?

Does it run current games?

Well, Far Cry is out of the question, but seeing as the most up-to-date game I've currently got is Jedi Knight Academy..........

I always go off the recommended specs though.

Can't think of too many games that I'd want to play that might overstretch the system.........

Depending on graphics card fitted, speed of hard disc and your usage pattern, you may need 256MB+ on XP. XP likes memory, for what I use it for 1GB or above is ideal, 256MB is fine if you only have one user session logged on at any one time and do browsing, email, and some simple word processing.

I do database related work too, and for that memory is essential. Video/photo editing enjoys having bags of free RAM too.

For the price of memory as it stands, 512MB is a decent amount for a new machine. 256MB is absolute minimum for XP Pro SP2 for an enjoyable experience. It runs (slowly) with 64MB though.

If you don't have a lot of memory turning off some of the graphical enjoyments (or annoyances, depending on your personal prefs) can make a very significant speedup possible.

The latest games like RAM, CPU power and GFX card power, and tend to use whatever they can to give you the best. If you haven't got enough memory to cache textures and so forth in memory, you WILL have a lower performance result, drop your resolution down a bit and it may just be ok

I find myself constantly twiddling with various settings in an effort to get more out of my system games-wise. First it was a new Graphics card, then it was more memory, then overclocking the graphics card, then overclocking the processor, then increasing the speed of the memory, then getting another new graphics card and overclocking it. Finally I fiddle with Anti-aliasing, ansiotropic filter settings, Frame-ahead render rate, anything that can be fiddled with I fiddle with, and usually cannot leave well enough alone until it either doesn't work or I get bored!!!