I am considering a basic upgrade to my rig (in my sig).
I am planning to buy an extra GB of RAM so that I can run KDE4.1 and other RAM intensive apps.
I have 2 slots for DDR RAM, and one slot is occupied by a 256MB DDR1 400MHz stick. I want to know if I will get better performance by inserting 1GB in the other slot, or by removing current stick and going 512MB + 512MB dual channel.
My motherboard has no expansion slots except two PCI slots and a PCIe x1 slot, and I have onboard GMA 900 Graphics. You can see that gaming is clearly not my priority, yet I older run games like Unreal Tournament 2004, Urban Terror, Quake 3, etc on linux and GTA 3/VC/SA, Halo, Counter Strike and DoTA on windows. But I care more about performance while compiling, opening lots of tabs in firefox, multitasking, etc than about gaming, unless I get a really huge boost while gaming.
On linux, I currently manage to game at minimum settings on Urban Terror with 100FPS by launching it on archlinux from startx command by placing urban terror in .xinitrc. I know its somewhat cheap, but the performance boost is huge. I got a good boost by changing the VRAM in the BIOS from 8mb to 32mb and launching the game this crazy way to save resources.
Other than gaming, I plan to shift to Gentoo 64bit and do a lot of compiling. I plan to use RatPoison, IceWM, Xfce and KDE4.1 as my WMs/DEs. I often do things like listening to music, running a download client, running firefox, running a bittorrent client, running system-updater, and a simple app in wine at the same time.
Please advice, as I am going to buy the ram very soon.
I am planning to buy an extra GB of RAM so that I can run KDE4.1 and other RAM intensive apps.
I have 2 slots for DDR RAM, and one slot is occupied by a 256MB DDR1 400MHz stick. I want to know if I will get better performance by inserting 1GB in the other slot, or by removing current stick and going 512MB + 512MB dual channel.
My motherboard has no expansion slots except two PCI slots and a PCIe x1 slot, and I have onboard GMA 900 Graphics. You can see that gaming is clearly not my priority, yet I older run games like Unreal Tournament 2004, Urban Terror, Quake 3, etc on linux and GTA 3/VC/SA, Halo, Counter Strike and DoTA on windows. But I care more about performance while compiling, opening lots of tabs in firefox, multitasking, etc than about gaming, unless I get a really huge boost while gaming.
On linux, I currently manage to game at minimum settings on Urban Terror with 100FPS by launching it on archlinux from startx command by placing urban terror in .xinitrc. I know its somewhat cheap, but the performance boost is huge. I got a good boost by changing the VRAM in the BIOS from 8mb to 32mb and launching the game this crazy way to save resources.
Other than gaming, I plan to shift to Gentoo 64bit and do a lot of compiling. I plan to use RatPoison, IceWM, Xfce and KDE4.1 as my WMs/DEs. I often do things like listening to music, running a download client, running firefox, running a bittorrent client, running system-updater, and a simple app in wine at the same time.
Please advice, as I am going to buy the ram very soon.
Comment