well since i will soon be building my new system i was wondering if i would see a performance gain if i were to go with 4 gigs of ram, rather than the standard 2?

pros and cons please

*and is the dominator ram from corsair worth it?

Running XP? No...
Running Vista? Probably so.

I was playing around a few months ago and believe or not, my machine booted much quicker with 3gigs of ram vs. 1.5.

Couldn't believe it until I swapped back and forth a few times, and sure enough my XP box was much quicker with more.

Then I tried the same thing with another machine, same results.

I didn't even have any software running in the background other than the ATi cat driver and AntiVIR.

RAM is a lot more expensive now though. Would have made more sense to buy a load of it 2 months ago when it was much cheaper.

It really depends what games you want to play and what OS you're using. I doubt you'll need more than 2 gigs for any Win XP system, I only have 512 in my 478 board and it purrs like a kitten. Presumably Vista will use more RAM than XP.

RAM is expensive. General rule of thumb for those of us on a budget, if you don't need it, don't buy it. Not that the world even "needs" technology.

As far as the dominator ram, if you can get 800mhz DDR2 there's a chance you're already faster than everyone who's using DDR. With that RAM you're paying for quality yes, but you're also paying for the Corsair name and the tech's "newness." Not to mention that big fancy heatsink.

You buy the best today and tomorrow it's crap. But hey, it's your money...and I need people to buy top of the line stuff so they keep making it. Eventually it'll fall into my price range. :-)

This could have more to do with ram speed and number of modules than simply allocation.

As Rich wrote, under XP, you loose, but under Vista, it will probably be necessary. We might even come to the day when we need 8 gig of Ram, though I hope not.

Dominator ram is good stuff, but mainly if you're heavy into overclocking and such. Tom's did an article on it not long ago and found between 0% and 5% advantage over normal XMS, depending upon application,, as I remember. If you have the money, lots of money, fine, but the money probably would be better spent on graphics cards and a faster cpu.

RAM speed?

Moved from 2 x 512MB + 2 x 256MB PC3200 dual channel on i865 chipset
to 2 x 512MB + 2 x 1GB modules

Same # of modules, same speed, same timings.

Just borrow some ram from a friend and try it.

Trust me, XP LOVES ram.

Won't get any extra fps in games, but it does make a difference when you are almost never paging to the hard drive

Actually, I tried turning my page file off on my Athlon 3000+ mATX system. Ran fine with 1 gig of 3500LL pro. Wouldn't boot with only 256. On my SLI system I have a G15 keyboard, the LCD screen shows me RAM usage. When I first popped Oblivion in with 2 gigs of ram I never even used more than 60%. :-)

ic, thanks for the reply. Well i was thinking about running vista and needing 4 gigs but since the final retail version isnt available quite yet we will have to wait to see if it makes a difference.

As for the dominator ram, i do not, have the money for it but was just wondering how good it was etc.

I'm sure it's some of the best, if not THE best on the market. I think you will see Vista using more than 2 gigs of ram frequently if you have it.

I hope i can take full advantage of my 4 gigs ram with vista ultimate.

this is the CPU SECTION of HARDWARE forum, please make sure next time you post it in the right section. And as for your question yes do get 4 GB of RAM its always better to be a little future proof.

i have another ram related question
How about the difference between DDR 667 and 800? is the a really discernable difference? i know that matching the frequency of the memory bus to 1:1 gives it good performance.. but by how much? and will corsair XMS2 PC6400cl3 do the job considering the processor to be E6600/E6700?

if you can, by all means, get it, and install a 64 bit version of Ultimate on your machine (to clarify for the future, x64 version be in the disc case along with the 32 bit version).
treat yourself to some sweetness. If you can.
if not, get 3 gigs.

YEs, especially running XP x64 you NEED 4G of RAM to squeeze 100% of your apps and as soon as more 64bit apps start to flood (all the new versions of the major software companies are supposed do have a 64bit version), 4-8G of RAM will not be that uncommon. So if I were Maverick7, I'd get 2x2G sticks with the open option for another 2x2 later.