how much would doubling my RAM improve my gaming

im thinking about putting 2gb of ram in my notebook this week and wondering would it improve my gaming at all or would it have no noticable effect

i mainly play cs:s, hl2, bf2 and max payne 1 (2 was a bit jumpy when i played it last) and i want to play doom3 but i cant get the bloody thing working properly

 

honestly it won't improve it all that much.

 

no, it would help immensly

 

Well, in truth it depens on the application. With the graphics card your running (assuming it is the x1300 in the lappie your talking about) I doubt that it would improve your gameplay much (albeit it might be more beneficial in other games like WoW if your into that kind of thing, but for the ones you listed I don't think it would make much difference). If you can however get it cheap I would do it as you can never get enough memory

(Edit: i'll have to agree with the next poster as more memory can smoothe out gameplay by having less reliance on the harddrive)

 

Eh, you are using XP Pro, so your operating system probably wasn't killing you.

If your graphics chip can make use of system ram (sometimes this works well, sometimes it really sucks) you might notice an increase in smoothness.

Increasing RAM generally smooths games out because the hard drive is accessed much less, increases in FPS are somewhat minimal.

Still, in my experience it can greatly increase the experience by adding that smoothness.

 

If you experience a lot of "hiccups" in games, such as smooth FPS one second and then a jerk the next, as if your computer's still "working" to load a game, then more RAM would help a lot.

 

2GB helps immensely in BF2. It should help pretty much everything else too.

 

well i can get some pretty cheap atm £48 for 2x1gb sticks made by crucial and i was thinking either that or a new hdd for my lappy, or just get some dvds and crap :lol:

 

i would get the ram. a lot of games benefit from 2 gigs of ram.
that x1300 is whats killing you though.

 

well changing out the gfx card atm isn't an option ,


id like to play crysis too but i really dont think it'll run on my laptop

 

Oh dang, yeah, its highly unlikely that Crysis would run on your X1300.

You could always hold out hope for one of those newfangled external videocard solutions that are supposedly coming out. If they work as advertised, they could revolutionize mobile gaming (a little bit )!!

 

2GB would help your loading times, mostly in BF2, but it wouldn't help that much, XP+1GB is the most effective costwise, getting 2GB is silly if you can spend the money on summat else