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How do I find out what kind of RAM I need to buy?

choucove

choucove

New Member
If you are wanting to continue running Windows XP, there isn't any point in installing or having more than 4 GB of RAM as unless you are using the specific 64-bit edition of Windows XP (not likely on an HP Pavilion computer) then it will not recognize more than about 3 GB of RAM anyways. The GeForce 6150LE is indeed an integrated graphics component, so there is no dedicated video card. In a system this age, putting in another video card might help as well.
 
signmeup

signmeup

New Member
I ordered a video card and ram from tiger direct. I will report what happens once said parts are installed. If it crashes and burns I'm out about 60 bucks and some time.
 
GAC05

GAC05

Quit buggin' me
Sounds like you are good to go.
Your system won't see more than 3gigs as usable out of the 4 but it will be much better than the 1gig you have now.
Just make sure they are sending you metric ram as that US standard stuff won't cut it with you being up there in Canada.

wayne k
guam usa
 
signmeup

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New Member
GAC05 said:
Sounds like you are good to go.
Your system won't see more than 3gigs as usable out of the 4 but it will be much better than the 1gig you have now.
Just make sure they are sending you metric ram as that US standard stuff won't cut it with you being up there in Canada.

wayne k
guam usa
Click to expand...
I decided to just order one extra gig of ram. The video card I ordered has 500 megs of ram which is double what the on board "card" used.
I ordered Old English ram because of my computer being an antique and all.
 
GAC05

GAC05

Quit buggin' me
Oops, you've run into "one step forward - half a step back" trade off.
Your net gain might be less than you expect.
By upgrading your video card you have cut down the amount of ram left for the system and programs to use.
It is not a one to one ratio but the more memory your vid card has the more address space out of the total memory pool needs to be set aside for it.
Getting the 4gigs memory & the card would have been the better way to go if there was not a whole lot of difference in the costs.

I have a dual core here running XP32 with a 512meg card, 4 gigs of ram and the 3gig switch turned on at boot.
With normal system processes running I have about 2.4 gigs of physical memory available to run my graphics stuff.
 
signmeup

signmeup

New Member
Well I'll be. I can pretend I understand... but I really don't. I thought adding a card with it's own ram would free up the ram the on board "card" was using. How much ram do you suppose I'll see? I'm hoping more than the the 896 I'm seeing now.

BTW, I seem to be using about 750megs or so in my day to day computing. My processor has spikes to about 50% usage at times.
 
B

buttons

New Member
signmeup said:
Well I'll be. I can pretend I understand... but I really don't. I thought adding a card with it's own ram would free up the ram the on board "card" was using. How much ram do you suppose I'll see? I'm hoping more than the the 896 I'm seeing now.

BTW, I seem to be using about 750megs or so in my day to day computing. My processor has spikes to about 50% usage at times.
Click to expand...

It does free up the ram the onboard card is using.. not sure what the other guy was trying to say.....
 
choucove

choucove

New Member
Actually, it technically does not free up the RAM.

Here's the deal from what I understand. In older operating systems and on some older video cards (the problem has had a design work around in Windows 7 and on newer graphics cards) the operating system still had to reserve the same amount of RAM as the video card has memory so that it can copy all the data held in the video card cache to RAM if the actual CPU needs to process the data. This was because the CPU could not directly connect to and access data stored in the RAM on the video card itself, and for some operations this data would have to be sent to the CPU for calculations and not just used by the GPU on the graphics card. This means that you'd be losing some space (even if it wasn't directly visible) in your RAM for it to process tasks from your graphics card. The good news is most newer platforms were smart enough to detect the presence of a dedicated graphics card and would disable setting aside RAM for use with the integrated graphics card, which wouldn't be used of course.

This effect was especially noticeable on a design computer we had recently. It was a dual-processor system running two AMD Opteron processors with 4 GB of DDR2 667 ECC Registered memory on a workstation motherboard supporting SLI graphics card configurations. After installing two graphics cards with just over 512 MB of memory in SLI (and memory reservations for other system requirements) the OS was only able to actually work with 2 GB of RAM (3.25 GB from Windows XP 32-bit minus a little over 1 GB from the two cards in SLI).

Again, I believe this is something that has been addressed and resolved in Windows 7 and with newer graphics card drivers.
 
B

buttons

New Member
Learn something new everyday I guess.. I was always taught that a dedicated vid card would free up your RAM.
 
signmeup

signmeup

New Member
Ok...... So I should see 1.5 gig of ram? And If I order one more stick of 1 gig I should see 2.5(ish)? Or it might dissable the on board ram and I'll see 2 gigs anyway? I think I'll wait and see what happens.
 
omgsideburns

omgsideburns

New Member
32 bit windows can only use 4gb of memory total, this includes your ram and your video.. it doesn't hurt to put 4 gigs in even if you have a video card if it's DDR, they will run a hair faster in pairs.. windows just won't utilize all of it.. it's a limit of the 32bit architecture.
 
choucove

choucove

New Member
Your platform should be new enough that it will disable the integrated graphics engine (the GeForce 6150LE) when you add in the dedicated graphics card. So, if you put 4 GB of RAM in your computer ant lets say that Windows only recognizes 3 GB (sometimes will be up to almost 3.5 GB) you then can probably subtract the amount of graphics card memory from that amount and get your total usable RAM (3 GB minus 0.5 GB = 2.5 GB usable.)
 
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OK.... so if I put in only 3 gigs of ram I should see 2.5 the same as if I put in 4 gigs?

I guess I'm missing why I would put in 4 gigs of ram if it can only see 3.
 
choucove

choucove

New Member
Sometimes it is possible that the system will be able to recognize slightly more than 3 GB of RAM, it just depends upon the BIOS and hardware. Also, as it was mentioned previously I believe, the computer system tends to operate slightly faster utilizing full pairs of RAM instead of having one channel only partially populated. This means in a dual-channel computer system (which yours would be) the computer works best with either one set of two sticks of RAM, or two sets of two sticks of RAM, always in pairs. It won't harm your computer to have three sticks of RAM, and the performance really won't be noticeable. You could probably just get 3 GB instead and be just fine.
 
Dirtmod#16

Dirtmod#16

New Member
Ram

Look for a CompUSA in your area, they have great prices on ram, they will check your system to find out what type of Ram and how much they can add. If you buy the Ram there they put it in for free, and they have a free check up. Just about anything you buy they install it for free.
 
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