3GB RAM good for Vista Home Premium and gaming?

My Toshiba Satellite X200, Comes with:

Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 2.4GHz Processor
2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM
GeForce 8700M GT with 256MB dedicated memory and TurboCache
1GB Intel TurboMemory
Vista Home Premium 32-Bit

After all the things I heard that gaming on Vista needs a lot of RAM (especially with the TurboCache that "boosts" the 8700M GT with RAM, by sharing memory) and a lot of games reaching the 2GB RAM limit, I wanted to upgrade the RAM up to 4GB.

However I heard that if you put 4GB RAM, only about 3,5GB will be recognised in Vista 32-Bit and if an application tries to use more, the system crashes.

Shall I just upgrade my RAM to 3GB or shall I get into the harder task of ordering from Microsoft a 64-Bit version, re-installing Vista and go for 4GB of RAM? Also, are there any problems with games running on 64-Bit Vista?

 

3GB would be nice. 4GB is Better. You will have to weigh the cost yourself with Vista64bit. I have ordered 4GB from newegg for my lappy when it comes. What I am doing since I am a gamer is going to dual boot Xp and Vista64bit.

Personally I don't like the performance of games within vista atm, but I know I will need DX10 for future games coming out.

 

What kind of games will you be playing?

 

To be completely honest with you, I think your system will run along quite happily at the spec its sitting at currently - both when simply using Vista and also when gaming. The 2GB will be more than sufficient when doing ordinary tasks such as word, email, multimedia (music and films) and browsing the internet. Having a dedicated card with 256MB helps when gaming as will the Turbo Memory.

I speculate that unless you plan to be playing very strenuous PC games you will be absolutely fine as things stand.

 

Answer to l0x:
Isn't Vista 64-Bit free if you give your Vista product key?

Answer to interosseous:
Quake 4, Flight Simulator X, FEAR, Battlefield 2, other new games (maybe Colin McRae Dirt and the coming soon Crysis)

Answer to Sub-D:
3GB will really show some performance difference in games than running with the 2GB of RAM?

Also, does my 1GB Intel TurboMemory, boost efficiently my laptop's performance?

 

The 1GB of Turbo Memory will help to increase performance which is why I think another stick of RAM on top will be overkill, especially since you have a dedicated GPU. I'm running 2.5GB of ram at the moment without Turbo Memory and an integrated graphics solution sucking up 128MB of ram and I can play WoW to the best extent that my GMA 950 will allow.

I think your system should be able to handle nigh on anything you throw at it the way it sits.

 

WoW doesn't require any equipment of "large calliber" to be played, I'm looking forward to more recent games with much higher system requirements.

 

The system doesn't crash when an application uses more than 3.5 GB ram (when you actually have 4 GB) on a 32 bit OS. The amount of ram that the computer thinks it has is what it will use and if it needs more it will use the page file, as windows was designed to do.

2 GB ram modules I imagine will lower in price over the next year or so, then I would say it would be a good idea to get 2 sticks of 2 GB, as eventually you (and everyone else) will slowly migrate to a 64 bit OS. And even if you don't, by next year you'll probably need as much ram as you can get for the next greatest game.

 

Having the 1GB of turbo memory means that upgrading to 3GB of 4GB at the moment really isn't a necessity. When more advanced games need the memory then you should upgrade since as Lt.Glare points out the price of DIMMs will be cheaper.

My example was to point out that I don't need more RAM even though you have an extra gig through Turbo Memory and have a dedicated GPU. I used to run WoW happily with 1.5GB of ram if that helps you to see that you don't need to upgrade yet.

 

I am not sure. I know XP 64-bit was free for awhile but I think they stopped that. I will look into it.


EDIT: no you have to buy Vista 64bit version. Though it dose come with Vista Ultimate. 32bit and 64bit together (got my copy at a MS conference for free)

Tip: Sign up for Microsoft Conferences when they are in your area. You get a lot of free stuff. I also got SQL and Office 2k7 Pro for free.
I signed up for a new one here in Michigan about the new Visual Studio. Sure they will give that away to.

 

XP64 had a 6months free trial

For vista, X64 is free if you bought the RETAIL version, Retail X64 comes with both DVDs and for the other version, it costs about $20 and microsoft will ship the x64 dvd to you.

OEM are as-is.

Yeah the conferance thingy is nice, they came one time in Quebec city but it was during a week day, school day =/

I was also in Vista beta testing and if you found a bug and reported, you got a Ultimate CD-Key through the email, but hotmail's junk filter made me loose it =/

 

its ~3.2 not 3.5

 

Talking to me or demon_of_razgriz?

 

Ouch bro. I was in the beta but I never installed it. Was to busy back then.

 

Who makes all these reports asying vista uses so much ram in games :s.

Running vista ultimate here on a PC with 2 gig of ram and a 8800GTX graphics card and not once in a game have I had my total ram usage go above 1.5gig. In general the game takes up about 1gig of ram and in most cases takes up far less. And no games currently need more than 512mb at max settings of Video ram and probably wont untill a fair way into the furture. Your graphics card will be struggling before 512MB of video ram is going to casue problems.

So seeing as you have 256MB onboard the most Turbo cache will use is 256MB sure it has a maxiumum of 1gig but what game do you know of that has textures that detailed with that huge a resolution that need 1.25 gig of video ram. There is a reason high end grpahics cards only have 768 or 1gig of ram and thats becasue no more will be needed for teh nest few years.

So even if you take into the account that a game would be useing say 1gig of ram and your graphics card steals 256mb of ram. Vista itself should be using bewteen 400 & 500 while in game. So that all adds upto 1.75 gig of ram being used so even 2 gig has you covered. But to be safe 3 gig is plenty. If games all of a sudden need double what they need now then with 3gig it will still be enough.

 

Lucky! you have a 8800 GTX...
Anyway... some good statements there pal...

 

I also heard that some games cannot install on Vista 64-Bit because they use 16-Bit installation engine that is not supported by 64-Bit. Is this true?

 

Not sure about that but I do know that the 64bit versions have alot more compatibility issues and alot more driver problems. Also in alot of cases the drivers arn't as well optimised for perfomance yet so you can lose a bit of perfomance in games but I don't think its that bad. I just stick with 32-bit at the moment becasue its I have no need for 64-bit yet. Maybe when I finnaly find teh need for more ram I will switch but for now 32-bit is perfect for me.

 

So, I'll stick to the 32-Bit version. It's okey, I'll install that 4GB RAM upgrade to get that 3,5GB RAM and have the rest 0,5GB as a future decision I'll make, or until some of the 64-Bit compatibility issues are fixed.

Thank you all.

 

Demon, how much RAM is your pc listed as the supposed max? Is it 2Gb?

I'm interested as I'll be doing the same thing in my pc. Nothing like a bit of headroom!!!

 

No, in the specs it says that has a maximum RAM expandility of 4,096MB. It can take up to 4GB of RAM. But the maximum RAM expandability varies from motherboard to mothermoard.