2GB of DDR400...what can you do w/it

dragonboyy3k · Oct 6, 2005, 01:07 PM

Hello everyone, mods, and pros..
i have a question and need some help to maximize my gaming experience
I currently have 2GB of DDR400 Kingston RAM.. what can i do to make games (in general) to use at least most of the RAM resource... because the most RAM i see they use are 300-350 MB... while i have 2 GB....And also how to i make the most out of my RAM.. speed up the system... etc.....Thank you

Firstperson · Oct 6, 2005, 01:28 PM

Set your page file to the same size. I would suggest 200/200 is a safe good bet. If your not using much ram....well play games that use more. Window is smart enough to use your two gigs when it needs to no real tweaks needed.

You could check to see if its running in dual channel that would help as well.

Edit I agree 200/200 is better

Lakevren · Oct 6, 2005, 03:00 PM

Run EverQuest2.
Thing needs like a truckload of mem no matter what anyways.
or maybe 2 instances of Battlefield 2

Anyways, I'm kidding.

The page filing thing, well, lots of people have lots of judgment about it.
Saw one article that said that if ya have 512 mb ram, set page filing to 1.5g. 1gig of ram, set it to 1g. 2gigs of ram, and try to put like a small amount (100-300 megs). That's what I use, the 100-300.
Makes my HD not thrash, and uses more of the mem. But sometimes, the pagefiling will grow no matter what you do, and that kinda ticks me off about WinXP.

**Vikingod** · Oct 6, 2005, 03:32 PM

page file, w/ two gigs, i have mine set to 200mb, I haven't had problems with running games, or photoshop. Set the max and min to the same amount, that will eliminate fragmentation. Check out tweakguides.com for thier tweaking companion, its great, and explains all sorts of stuff. Good luck.

cswiger · Oct 8, 2005, 12:51 PM

Welcome to DH, dragonboyy3k. You should start in the BIOS, and check your FSB:RAM speed, enable dual-channel if available as someone else suggested, and you should try increasing your AGP aperature size to the largest size you have (256MB, generally).

You ought to check in-game settings and increase the texture size setting if not already at max.

ROBSCIX · Oct 9, 2005, 01:54 PM

What about a RAM disk utility tha allows you to use a portion of you RAM as a high speed disk. I seen a couple guys on a computer show load a game into that section of the RAM. The computer thinks it's loading things from disk..but it is actually coming from you RAM..would make your favorite game run very good. Maybe another user can give you better details. Actually I am picking up 1 gig of Ram so I am glad you reminded me of that. I think that the Name, when you set it up a portion of you RAM will show up as a drive...so I would set 750mb drive..load a game into it for a test and play the game from that...Actually given the throughput of your RAM a game should FLY...let us know if you attempt it...

dragonboyy3k · Oct 9, 2005, 10:26 PM

Thanks for yall input...
I actually heard about the RamDrive thingie.. but have been doing a little research on it.. and half of the people say it is not good or does nothing but crash ur system... while the other half say it does increase performance but not drastically... (i think one of the thread is from this forum).....Anyways... about the AGP size.... ..do i still go into the BIOS and set the apature size to 256... eventhough i got a 128MB DDR Radeon 9800 PRO...????....well the memory size is 256.... if you counting the DDR ...double rate... I am not familar on this .can someone please explain...
--well wat i am looking forward is ...to use my 2GB.DDR400 RAM ..toward gaming...so that it will have best performance and fps as possible.... I might try the RAMDRIVE trick see if that give anything.......if anyone have an experience on this please share...

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SPECS..

MOBO:A8V Deluxe
128DDR Radeon 9800 Pro (overclock to 405core,362mem)
200GB Ultra ATA Maxtor
2GB DDR400 Kingston (should have gotten OCZ but these were free for me )
Winchester AMD 64 3000+ (currently runing at 2.25 GHz)
OC...running on stock air only...

ROBSCIX · Oct 10, 2005, 10:58 AM

DDR is a newer RAM..A computer has a mian signal called it's CLOCK it is a square wave..RAM before DDR would only read/write on one edge..meaning it did only one action per clock cycle. DDR-double data rate performs actions on both edgaes of the clock cycle so say your FSB is running at 133MHZ then your RAM is running at 266 MHZ..both edges of the clock cycle. Make sense? Aside from using that RAM for a ram drive and installing a game into that i don't know exactly what you can do to help with you gaming..YOu can optimize windows to use more RAM..keep the XP kernal in memory. I will be getting a gig soon and I remebered about that RAM drive, now I can't wait to get it. Consider how fast you ram is compared to a HDD..so if your system is tricked into thinking a part of your hi performance RAM is a 750mb hdd for example and a game has been installed into that part of the RAM...it should fly pretty good..think of a game thats constantly accessing the disk for images or more level code etc. if using the ram drive that load time would be almost nil..or very fast anyway...I can'r give you any advice I only seen it done on a computer show and I was very impressed with the idea as weel as the performance I seen. It's up to you. BTW as far as aperture size goes I was told 2X your ram on the gfx card..hope that helps..