Celestia Forums

Last year,was my video card,that changed from 6600 GT to 7600 GT.Now I ordered an extra 1 GB of RAM memory and my future system will be the following:

Athlon 64 3000 Venice 939
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
2 GB RAM DDR 400(2X512MB DDR400 Kingston Value Dual+1 GB DDR400 Kingston Value)
XFX 7600 GT PCI-E 256 MB
HD Seagate 160.0 GB 7200 rpm SATA

As you can see,I will lose the dual channel,but I don??t think will be a big deal since I have a modest Geforce 7 and not a high end model.Anyway,with this upgrade,I expect to end all lock downs or at least,to end MOST of the lockdowns.Since I didn??t change other things,I didn??t expect a miracle,but probably I will be able to run bigger maps with less drop of frame rate.What do people that increase your RAM memory think about this?

Of course,since I have about 66% of my HD full,I will buy an adittional HD of 320 GB SATA II by the end of the year.But for now,it??s enough.I can??t spare any more money RIGHT NOW...

Daniel,

I hope you will not encounter any problems with your new memory.

In general, it is strongly adviced that expansion RAM be VERY similar in characteristics and occupies the 4 memory slots equally. It may work nevertheless, but these are the recommendations...

So you ordered a single 1GB non-dual DIMM to go together with 2 x 512MB dual (double sided) DIMMs. Why exactly didn't you order another 2x512 MB in dual? (The timings 3-3-3-8 (SPD) of the latter are VERY slow, actually. It's well worth tuning them manually.).

Bye Fridger

Because THINGS AREN??T SUPPOSED TO BE ALWAYS LIKE WE WANT.DDR 400 is becoming very rare and it??s very hard to find a kit 2X512 MB Kingston Value,like mine.I find none,only DDR2...

danielj wrote:Because THINGS AREN??T SUPPOSED TO BE ALWAYS LIKE WE WANT.DDR 400 is becoming very rare and it??s very hard to find a kit 2X512 MB Kingston Value,like mine.I find none,only DDR2...

I found various mail order places for your original kingston-value DIMMs for ~ 100 $.

Bye Fridger

You may be right,but NOT in Sao Paulo,Brazil.
I have a guy that install the hardware,but he couldn??t find it in its suppliers for the past months.Of course that the kit will be better and I rather have it,but in a site called "Mercado Livre",there are few of them and some are sold out.So I do what I can.I know that some people even mix RAM memories of different brands and even with modules of no brand at all and even so,its computer recognizes them.I can only expect that I will not have any problems...

t00fri wrote:

danielj wrote:Because THINGS AREN??T SUPPOSED TO BE ALWAYS LIKE WE WANT.DDR 400 is becoming very rare and it??s very hard to find a kit 2X512 MB Kingston Value,like mine.I find none,only DDR2...

I found various mail order places for your original kingston-value DIMMs for ~ 100 $.

Bye Fridger

danielj wrote:I know that some people even mix RAM memories of different brands and even with modules of no brand at all and even so,its computer recognizes them.I can only expect that I will not have any problems...

Do you already have a "plan B" if your upgraded machine starts developing "mysterious" memory errors? Can you return the memory if it does not work reliably?

Bye Fridger

I think so,but probably if this happens,I may be forced to return to 1 GB and try to get my money back.

Now with 2 GB RAM,I finnaly can use big models,running smoothly.With 1 GB,the big Hubble cmod model with 36 MB have frequent slowdowns.Now,the same model runs at about 30-40 fps...
3D Mars is another story,since it requires another video card to run well and I can??t buy it right now.

danielj wrote:Now with 2 GB RAM,I finnaly can use big models,running smoothly.With 1 GB,the big Hubble cmod model with 36 MB have frequent slowdowns.Now,the same model runs at about 30-40 fps...
3D Mars is another story,since it requires another video card to run well and I can??t buy it right now.

Congratulations, apparently you were lucky with your new memory stick! Indeed, 2 GB is the right amount of RAM these days. But I am still surprised that your increased RAM should affect your /graphics/ performance so significantly. The latter is largely dominated by the performance of your graphics card (GPU) and its associated memory...

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote: But I am still surprised that your increased RAM should affect your /graphics/ performance so significantly. The latter is largely dominated by the performance of your graphics card (GPU) and its associated memory...

Bye Fridger

With the fairly full complement of addons which it seems that DanielJ likes to run, perhaps his slowdowns and white-screens were due to one or both of the following:
1. Memory leakage due to Celestia not swapping out old textures from memory (ie. he was max'ing out his 1GB),
2. disk-swapping of textures between disk and RAM?

I would expect that texture-rich models are VRAM and RAM intensive, whereas frame-rates of polygon-rich models would be more dependent on GPU processor speed and bandwidth.

Would you largely agree with that analysis?

As for myself::
With my 256MB of RAM and integrated graphics , I usually disable any addons I'm not currently interested in or working on (to avoid any possibility that more than one might be in the FOV at the same time!! )

Chuft-Captain wrote: With the fairly full complement of addons which it seems that DanielJ likes to run, perhaps his slowdowns and white-screens were due to one or both of the following:
1. Memory leakage due to Celestia not garbage collecting unused textures from memory (ie. he was max'ing out his 1GB),
2. disk-swapping of textures between disk and RAM?

I would expect that texture-rich models are VRAM and RAM intensive, whereas frame-rates of polygon-rich models would be more dependent on GPU processor speed and bandwidth.

Would you agree (in general) with that analysis?

As for myself, with my 256MB of RAM and integrated graphics :!, I tend to disable any addons I'm not currently interested in / working on (to avoid any possibility that more than one might be in the FOV at the same time!! )

I suppose you are essentially right.

I am amazed how you apparently manage to get your machine running with only 256MB of RAM. I would have expected that about the only thing one can confidently do with so little RAM is emailing and visiting forums

Is this a notebook? Because otherwise it rather looks like "masochism" , since memory for desktops is so cheap these days. We are talking here about the price of a pizza + coke for you and your company

Bye Fridger

I reduced the addons to a minimum...
Actually,I can say that Celestia is much heavier than Google Earth,since I can run smoothly GE,but not Celestia at very high resolutions.
Maybe you are right that frame rate is dependent of VGA,but I??m trying to forget this a bit,since i don??t have money to buy another video card every year.Actually,my next video card will be bought only in the middle of 2008 or even early 2009!

t00fri wrote:

Chuft-Captain wrote: With the fairly full complement of addons which it seems that DanielJ likes to run, perhaps his slowdowns and white-screens were due to one or both of the following:
1. Memory leakage due to Celestia not garbage collecting unused textures from memory (ie. he was max'ing out his 1GB),
2. disk-swapping of textures between disk and RAM?

I would expect that texture-rich models are VRAM and RAM intensive, whereas frame-rates of polygon-rich models would be more dependent on GPU processor speed and bandwidth.

Would you agree (in general) with that analysis?

As for myself, with my 256MB of RAM and integrated graphics :!, I tend to disable any addons I'm not currently interested in / working on (to avoid any possibility that more than one might be in the FOV at the same time!! )

I suppose you are essentially right.

I am amazed how you apparently manage to get your machine running with only 256MB of RAM. I would have expected that about the only thing one can confidently do with so little RAM is emailing and visiting forums

Is this a notebook? Because otherwise it rather looks like "masochism" , since memory for desktops is so cheap these days. We are talking here about the price of a pizza + coke for you and your company

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:Is this a notebook?

You guessed it.