is it worth getting 8GB of RAM

Heya,

Need to know what OS you're using.

I assume you're using Vista 64, based on the 4gigs you're using. 4gigs is more than enough for Vista 64 & gaming. Adding more is never a bad thing. As for making it faster for the addition, the only way to truly make that happen after your 4gig mark is to disable page filing and make the system actually use all 8 gigs instead of swapping it with virtual memory all the time.

That said, I have 8gigs in Vista64. No page file. Love it.

Cheers,

Another 4gb of DDR2-800 ram will cost you $25-50, so the price is not much. If you are doing lots of multitasking, particularly while gaming, then it definitely will be helpful.

On the downside, it is much harder to overclock with 4 sticks vs. 2 sticks, so you may have to back off the OC.

More ram speeds up your PC by keeping things in memory instead of waiting while hard drive I/O fetches the data. It also helps by reducing hard page faults which stop your CPU while the page fault is retrieved from the page file on the hard drive.

Faster ram helps by speeding up the CPU a bit. However, the C2D processors are very insensitive to ram speeds. The benefits to real applications like games is minimal(vs. synthetic benchmarks) . +1fps would be a good result going from the slowest to the fastest ram. If you are overclocking, the benefit is more.

Remember, though, the vga configuration is all important for games, not the cpu in general.

Here's my experience. When I jumped from 4 gig of ram to 8 gig of ram, I had to back off on the overclock at bit. Performance in games made no noticeable change, which would indicate that what I lost in the overclock was made up for by the additional ram. The one place where the change is beneficial is when I am doing business work and loading the computer down a lot. At that time, the computer speed is noticeably faster with 8 gig.

So based on my experience, for gaming, I would say that 4 gig is enough at the moment. This might change as new games become more complex, but that is something of the future and is hard to judge. As a side note, the new i7 boards with 6 gig of ram seem to bridge the question very nicely in my opinion.

Whenever someone asks this question, going on about 15 years now, I give the same stock answer.

"More memory will not make your computer faster, but it should make it slow down less."

Should I get the 4mb or 8mb module?

I really want Windows 3.11 to open my floppy disks faster.

Is it the same model? Mixing models is some times a big pain.

You may have to loosen the timings and raise the voltages a bit.