Desktop Memory Question

[Angelie]

Is it true that you cannot always just put in 4 sticks of regular 1 Gig ram on any motherboard (granted the motherboard supports 4 240 pin sticks)? You have to get special kinds of 1 gig memory (quite significantly more expensive) to make them register as 4 gigs and run properly? That otherwise, u can only really use 2 1 gigs or 4 512 mb sticks...

[Ty!]

It really does depend. Your motherboard manual would say definitively what combinations it allows. Often it *is* allowed to have two different pairs (for DDR) - e.g. 2x512m, 2x1g -> 3g total. But I wouldn't assume it without checking your MB. Usually you can go to the manufacturer's website and download a pdf manual (after opening your case to look at the label on the board, if you don't already know).

4 gig is the almost absolute limit unless you have a 64-bit CPU. I've had 2 gig for a while and find it sufficient; 1 is definitely acceptable for wow.

[Angelie]

When I used to play on my laptop, it only had 1 gig of ram and really suffered while playing WoW. I would sometimes even get booted from flying out of IF through the tunnel or leaving the Inn as I approach the bank/AH area. After putting in 2 gigs of ram, my laptop runs better than my desktop even though it's only a pentium M 1.4 ghz. The jump from 1 to 2 gigs of ram definitely helped me.

However, I only run wow on my laptop when i play wow. I prefer though to be able to run other apps to (operating WOW on window mode) while playing wow on my desktop, such as watching movies/porn/etc while waiting for OTL or ppl are just too slow to run back. listening to music would be cool too but running winamp and wow to me makes my desktop lag a bit as well.

two gigs is probably my initial target...but my target mb has 4 slots avaialble and i would at least would like the option to fill those other two to have 4 gigs max when i have a bit of cash to burn...

PS
I installed windows vista on my current PC and it's significantly slower than windows xp. i dunno if it's just ram or needs a faster cpu - but maybe vista will utilize more ram to make things run faster/smoother/better in general.

[Kalim]

Ang,

What is the graphic card on the laptop / pc? And is the graphic card on the laptop shared memory or dedicated memory? (Only asking cause a 256mb shared memory graphic card on a laptop makes the computer only have 756mb to work with instead of 1gig etc...)

Also, Windows Vista as I've gathered is much more a ram hog than any other operating system and in order to do all the visual bells and whistles requires a pretty decent graphic card (the speed and ram size dedicated to the graphic card), so that may contribute to the slow down.

Should check the motherboard's manual to see if there is a way to get to 4 gigs of ram on a dual-channel configuration, or if you have to sacrifice dual-channel in order to achieve the 4gigs.

Maybe list the spec of your desktop and laptop just for reference sake? =D

[Eomer]

Pretty sure that Windows XP is only able to recognize 3gb of memory, and you have to edit an .ini file or something for that. Or maybe that's to get it up to 4gb. Not sure, really. Basically 2gb is the max you'd need for an XP box.

Vista on the other hand I'm sure will take advantage of more. It's going to come down to what your motherboard chipset supports, or in the case of AMD, what the CPU supports (since the memory controllers are built in).

[Angelie]

Hi Kalim,

The laptop has a radeon 9 series (dell laptop) with 256 mb of dedicated memory. - Pentium M 1.4 Ghz 2 gig ram

The desktop has a GeForce 6 series or ATI Radeon 9600 (256 mb ram on both - i swap sometimes to see who has the best performance). - Pentium 2.0 Ghz 1 gig ram

Maybe it's all the spyware in my comp that makes playing on it suck...

PS
Damn you Aindayen!! I know I said I was going to buy a new comp months ago but I bought a plasma tv instead

[Kirynos]

I'd agree with what everyone said in this thread so far.

Definitely check out how much your motherboard will hold for ram, and how it has to be inserted (yes, my computer would not work unless I had certain ram chips in certain slots) I know I posted my computer somewhere around here, and it's not too shabby for wow.

I'm not that smart on those laptop thingy's, so best to ask someone else on that.