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Will more RAM speed up my system?

One question we always come across is how much random access memory (RAM) do you need for a computer to speed it up. Up to a point, adding RAM will normally cause your computer to seem faster on certain types of operations.

When you run a program such as a word processor or an internet browser, the CPU in your computer pulls the file off the hard disk and loads it into RAM. The microprocessor also pulls in a number of shared dynamic link libraries (DLLs), shared pieces of code used by multiple applications. The DLLs take many more megabytes. Large programs can use large amounts of memory.

The microprocessor (CPU) loads in the data files at which you want to use, which might total several megabytes if you have loaded more than one document or browsing several pages with a lot of graphics. This can slow your system down significantly if there isn’t enough memory. On your computer system, you may at any given time you might have several applications running: A word processor, an email program, a spreadsheet, several internet browser windows and so on. All these programs plus the operating system will use the available RAM.

Every time something is loaded or opened, it is placed into RAM. This simply means that it has been put in the computer’s temporary storage area so that the CPU can access that information faster and more easily. The CPU requests the data it needs from RAM, processes it and writes new data back to RAM in a continuous cycle. When an application is closed, it and any accompanying files are usually purged (deleted) from RAM to make room for new data. If there isn’t enough RAM, the computer uses the Hard Drive to store these temporary files. A hard drive is a lot slower than RAM and so if your computer stores all this data on the hard drive instead of RAM , it will inevitably slow down the computer.

RAM is important because it reduces the need for the computer to “swap” data to the hard drive.

When Windows XP was first introduced RAM was still very expensive and many systems were built using smaller amounts of RAM like 128 Megabytes and 256 Megabytes. Windows XP actually required more RAM to run efficiently. In turn XP used the “Swap File” on the hard drive a lot more extensively. This slowed down the computer a lot because hard drives are a lot slower than RAM. Upgrading the system to 1 Gigabyte of RAM sped the system up dramatically because XP no longer needed to use the Swap File on the hard drive so extensively. It meant XP could use the larger amount of RAM to swap the data around rather than the hard drive.

This led to the common belief that the more RAM in a system the faster the computer. In fact, this is not always the case.

If your computer system had only 128 megabytes of RAM and you upgraded to 1 gigabyte, you would really notice the speed increase quite dramatically. But increasing the RAM from 1 gigabyte to 2 gigabytes or more, makes very little difference to the speed of the system. XP was very comfortable with 1 gigabyte of RAM.

Microsoft Vista is generally very comfortable with 2 or 3 gigs of RAM and increasing RAM beyond this usually results in very little speed increase. There are, however, some programs that do prefer extra RAM. These are usually large photo editing programs and the like.

A 32-bit version of Vista or XP will never even use the full 4GB of RAM in your system. It’s because of the memory mapped IO reservations, which control how the onboard memory on your installed devices overwrites parts of the system memory, which lowers the total memory available to Vista or XP itself. According to Microsoft, the 32-bit version of Vista is limited to 3.12GB of total available memory. This can vary according to how the system has addressed the RAM from the Video Graphics card. You can usually expect anything from 3.12GB to 3.58GB

To go beyond 4 gigabytes means you need Vista (or XP) 64bit. But installing 8 gigabytes of RAM will not increase performance of your system. Unless you have a program which can specifically use all this RAM then the extra RAM is usually wasted. If you require more speed and performance extra RAM will not help. Spending the extra money on a faster CPU or Graphics card is the best way to go.

Below is a chart demonstrating the performance of RAM

Clearly these results show that more RAM does not always yield better performance.

Manufacturers claim that RAM running in DUAL channel runs 20-25% faster. Our test results indicate that DUAL channel yields less than 1% extra over SINGLE channel.

Note that increasing RAM from 4gig to 8gig resulted in almost identical scores. No performance increase at all.

These tests were conducted using PCMark05.

Toms Hardware supports my findings…. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/PARALLEL-PROCESSING,1705-11.html