"It's always better to have more memory; 256MB would be nice," says Confer, who uses his home computer to play games and store photographs. "The new games require so much memory. Your memory is a lot faster than your hard drive. Memory runs better, faster, and loosens up the bottleneck.".
Graphics & Multimedia.
Graphics and multimedia applications are among the most memory-intensive and may reap the most noticeable benefit from a large amount of RAM. .
Studies by Crucial Technology and eTesting Labs have shown that a Windows 2000 system running multimedia programs gains a performance increase of up to 102.5% by upgrading from 64MB to 256MB. Going as high as 384MB produced gains up to 115%. The studies used Adobe PhotoShop 5.0, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 7.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 2.0, Netscape Navigator 4.6, and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 4.5. The machines ran several applications at once and switched between applications frequently. Both tests used high-end systems, one with an Athlon 800MHz processor and one with a Pentium III 533MHz chip.
Upgrading the Athlon 800 system from 64MB to 256MB resulted in an improvement of up to 102.5%. Going from 64MB all the way up to 384MB increased system performance by 115%. Notice that returns diminish considerably after a certain point, which means less RAM for your buck. .
The results for the Pentium system were not as dramatic, but also demonstrated marked improvements. An upgrade from 64MB to 256MB resulted in a 44.1% increase, and going from 192MB to 384MB yielded a 17.9% increase. .
The same study tested Win2000 in business use and reported that going from 64MB to 128MB gave an additional 17% improvement. Moving beyond 128MB to 256MB resulted in an average improvement of only 1% for business users. The tests were conducted with a variety of processor speeds and showed that faster processors yield the most dramatic improvement with RAM upgrades.
Internet Surfing.
