Performance Difference Between 2 GB and 3 GB of RAM

I have my ASUS G1S, and I figured that I wanted to buy a laptop cooler to cool it down as well as giving it another stick of RAM. The only drawback I have that would keep me from buying it is that there are two slots on the notebook and both have 1 GB of ram. If I was to update to 3 GB, I'd have to take the 1 gig out and replace it with a 2 gig. That costs twice as much money and set me back like $100. That brings me to my question. Is the performance difference that noticeable when I update from 2 GB to 3?

Oh yeah, I play a lot of graphically demanding games such as FEAR, BF 2142, DOOM 3, etc.

 

stay with 2GB it is better since u're running it dual channel.

if you play graphically demanding game like that under XP, i don't think u'll notice much improvements (you'll might get a drop in performance if you get 3GB since it wont be running dual channel thus half the memmory bandwith). you'll notice improvements if you get a better graphic card though.

 

On my destop system I went from 2GB to 3GB mainly because RAM is cheap at the moment. To be honest though I don't really think it has made much difference. RAM usage rarely goes above 50%.

I think on a laptop the bottleneck for games performance when you have 2GB is going to be the graphics card rather than anything else. (Although I have read Supreme Commander can utilise the extra memory)

 

I think the extra gig of ram would give you a bit more benefit under Vista then XP.

 

So in actual fact, 2 GB of RAM would be better than 3 GB for gaming because it got the double the memory bandwidth? Is the performance difference noticeable?

 

you should take a look in the Asus forum for a topic called 8600GT G1S vs 8600GS F3Sv, Ken upgraded from 2gb to 3gb and got a massive performance boost.

 

i just got my f3v and upgraded it to 3GB...seems pretty nice...however, in cpu-z under the max bandwith place it says that its running at 333mhz...some ppl said that its normal since DDR2=667 or smth...does it have something to do with the dual channel thing? cheers

 

It's called Double Data Rate, DDR. 333mhz at DDR is 667.

 

forget about dual channel, its not a big deal, the big performance boost with the extra gig of ram is from letting the system turbo cache more memory for the video card, and if you use vista it gives vista alot more memory to cache programs and files with.

The Dual channel that everybody is worrying about is a very small boost in performance and much outdone with the extra gb of ram, even more of a point to make is most notebooks now support asymetric dual channel wich means... dual channel with 3gb of ram.

 

Thanks for all the help guys, I may just stay with the 2 GB. I also thought it would stop all the lagging I'm getting in BF and such. I'm thinking it's heat lag, especially when I'm around other vehicles. The G1S runs hot so I figured another gig of ram and a cooling pad would do it wonders, but for now I'm gonna stick with the pad.