2GB of RAM: Useful or Waste of Money??

depends, I could never see living with out it on my desktop, but that's mainly because I never turn my desktop off, with a laptop, you tend to turn it off more. I have heard however that 2GB of ram can really help out the FPS in games so if you are a avid gamer it's deffinately worth getting.

2GB wasteful.

I have two desktop systems. Both used for video rendering and playing game.

One has 1.0 GB and the other have 2.0 GB,

I see no differnces between them.

I don't know...watching my memory meters I peg 1gb all the time with the things I do...adobe and macromedia products, plus web sites, email, and music playing. I think more would be useful...

Price considering: 1.5GB is the sweetspot. It'll get you into programs like Avid if you do video editing and/or a lot of music encoding and will serve all your other needs.

However, if you don't do encoding work (video or audio) on a regular basis, just stick to 1GB. IMO, I would not use anything less than that on a pentium-m (Dothan) lappy.

Lots of feedback on this one

Gaming: MMORPG's like Everquest II and WOW smooth right out with 2G. They can grab an entire map/zone and hold it in Ram without swapping huge texture files (some
are hundreds of Megs) back and forth.

Applications: Anyone developing software will appreciate the ability to reduce memory pressure. With 2G ram, I can turn off or rarely use my page file, give 512M to SQL server, and have plenty of headroom for my development suite as well as the runtime requirements of the app I am developing/debugging.

2G, go for it I say

2GB RAM would also be helpful if you watch DVDs on the go a lot with your laptop... Grab one of those DVD programs that loads up as much of the movie it can and sticks it in the RAM and then shuts off the optical drive until it needs to read more of it, instead of constantly powering the optical drive.

If you have extra money go with 2GB, but it currently doesn't warrant the DDR2 over 230ish per 1GB price tag right now

Blah, I play EQ2 on both of my machine and see no differences. LoL! I even play SWG. Haven't tried WOW yet though.

I'm interested in this... Care to give more details, please?

smilepak, are you running at max textures on eq2? with my 1g machine, I have to tone it down, though I have the video HP to run it. You could also be bottlenecking with other things...

Very wasteful. 512 megs is all one needs now and for gamers 1 gig.
Anybody(business profesionals excluded) who says they need 2 gigs is just showing off their size etc etc...

Daley

I don't think anyone can give a general statement like "2gb is wasteful" or "2gb is useful". A quick test to see if you will even notice a difference with extra memory is to open task manager, go to the Performance tab and look at the Commit Charge Peak value after you've used your machine for a while. If, for example, it never peaks above 1gb, then you don't need more than 1gb. Run intensive programs, etc etc, to see where you will peak.

I use my laptop mainly for work, and find in an average work day I peak around 1.5gb. The highest I've seen it so far was at around 1.7gb. For me, 2gb made a big difference - I could turn off the pagefile, and find I never bottleneck due to disk access now.

Now, is the time saved because of additional ram worth the expense? This is a tough question, and is different for anyone based on budget, tolerance for waiting, etc etc. For me, work paid for the memory upgrade so it was a no brainer. For others, the cost of a 1gb stick may be too much to pay for a few seconds/minutes savings each day in wait time. But for me personally, even if work didn't pay, I'd do the upgrade. There were time's I've literally waited 5 minutes or more when switching between applications when I was at 512megs of ram (I normally run Virtual PC, Oracle, and VS.NET all the time, with other applications on the side). Now, as I said, I don't notice any wait times.

-Peter

Exactly how big is the performance difference in video encoding between 1GB and 2GB?

2GB is not wasteful, when i was creating an AVI from still pictures for a DVD i was makeing i had to turn my swap on for the first time in 1.5 years, i had 900 pictures at 1280x1024 in my memory and that needed 1.8GB my total ram size of 1GBRAM + 3GBSwap LOL. damn my computer was slow.

so if you are video editing, MAX your ram or your computer will be a dog when you start swapping. (i was swapping to raid 0 drives and it still sucks)

If you can afford it get it who knows what may come out in the near future that could use the memeory i have 2 gigs have seen a huge improvement in the amout of swaping and load times on alot of my games also I pull up huge Video files and have not a single problem editing them fast easy smooth. People say that its w waste but they don't have 2gigs in there system so how do they know. (oh wait benchmarks )

Two sticks of 1GB for $360 is a pretty good deal. Make sure it is a good quality known brand memory or you will regret it.

Right now I know that Mushkin.com having 10% off on their memory now.

As for Dual Channel vs Single channel, see sticky. There is one from Tom's Hardware. He specificed dual channel ddr2 is at max best 5% compared to single channel DDR2

Still pictures on DVD? Use photodex.com. It is the BEST software I've found, outside of Adobe Premier which is like in the Hundreds $ zone.

Photodex is less than 70bucks. There are a lot of sample on their gallery for you to see. Highly recommended.

still pictures being tween faded into each other to create a motion picture, i used it for the red vs blue DVD menu, i got halo babie backgrounds and tweened them into each other, looks really good! lol