PC geeks need help

JMOliver

JMOliver

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jul 17, 2008
Location
Winston-Salem
Its been a while since i built this thing and need help!

Whats the most ram i can use? My MB has 4 slots for it. I currently have two 2gb sticks at the moment. Can i do four 2gb sticks?

Also i use Windows 7 64bit

Also is there a faster processor i can use?. Right now its a Pentium D Dual core thats 3.2 running at 3.59 on both cores with a FSB of 898


This is the motherboard i have http://reviews.cnet.com/motherboards/foxconn-p9657ab-8ekrs2h-motherboard/4507-3049_7-32518443.html

Thanks
JMOliver
 
Yeah, your link says you can have up to 8GB on that board. You'll want to make sure that the new DIMMs are the same speed as the existing ones.

I doubt you'll see much of a difference unless you're doing cad work, video editing, or trying to run a couple of VMs. Even running games, neither of my Win7 boxes at the house will use more than 4GB... my work machine, however, uses every bit of its 16GB on a regular basis.
 
That looks like a fairly old, and not particularly high-end motherboard. I'm not sure I'd dump any money into it. Maybe swap in a new mobo/chip/ram as a package... but you'd probably see a bigger performance improvement with an SSD and maybe a newer video card.
 
shawn said:
Yeah, your link says you can have up to 8GB on that board. You'll want to make sure that the new DIMMs are the same speed as the existing ones.

I doubt you'll see much of a difference unless you're doing cad work, video editing, or trying to run a couple of VMs. Even running games, neither of my Win7 boxes at the house will use more than 4GB... my work machine, however, uses every bit of its 16GB on a regular basis.
Click to expand...


At what point will you see a difference? I have 4gb in mine right now, and I was looking to upgrade it to 8. The recent Steam Holiday Sale netted me a few games I want to try, and all run fairly slowly. I know I need a new vid card, but will 4gb of ram get me by? My motherboard supports up to 16gb (I have Win7 64bit). It honestly wouldn't be that costly to get it up to 16 as I built the pc about 3 years ago.
 
You can always just open Task Manager and see. If it's getting up to 3, 3.5 GB, there's probably some disk swapping going on. But it's really more complicated than that. If you're using DDR2 (and slow ones at that), then you're going to have a bottleneck there that more ram isn't going to overcome. As far as gaming performance goes, the video card has the single biggest impact on in-game performance. Again, it might be hindered by a lack of system memory, but that should be easy to address.

Like you said, ram is cheap, and it's not going to hurt anything. I just wouldn't expect to see a night/day difference. If you want to see a big improvement, replace a "green" drive with an SSD.
 
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