Hi all, im new to this forum so be nice Im not a complete idiot when it comes to PC's but im not a genious either and so would like to ask for a little bit of help from people who know better. Today i bought some more RAM (DDR2) for my PC to see if it would help with speeds. I had 3 gig previously and so after having to take 1 gig out (i never realised there would only be 3 slots lol) i now have 4. However now when i check the rating of my pc it has dropped slightly :S Is this because i have 2 x 1 gig and a 2 gig? should i have replaced all 3 memory units? Its an Intel Q 6600 if tha helps any?! Any info would be very much appreciated...
Welcome to HWF! You had a Q6600 and 3gb of RAM and it was slow?! Crikey! Mixing and matching RAM isn't normally recommended. What speed was the old RAM, and what speed is the new RAM? It should say DDR2 PC6700 800Mhz, or something similar somewhere on the packaging or on the RAM. Also, what operating system are you using? I'm guessing Vista by the rating thing. If it's 32bit, then it won't recognise the whole 4gb, due to some limitation. However, if it's 64bit then it shouldn't matter. If it came with 3gb of RAM, then it's likely to be 32bit.
I wouldnt really say it was slow, if im honest i wanted to knock the settings up a bit on GTA 4 a bit lol. I realise it prob wont have any effect but thought an extra gig could only be a good thing anyway. I am running 32 bit Vista with a 8800 GT and replaced 1gb samsung 5300 pc2 - with 2gb geil 6400 800mhz pc2. The other 2 1 gig unit will still be the samsung's. Guessing i've wasted my time and money duh.. should i switch the RAM back?
Have you managed to increase the quality of GTA4? If so, then I'd leave it. I'm not sure how the vista rating thing works, but I wouldn't consider it a worthy benchmark. What you could do it download 3DMark, and run it with the old RAM config and the new one, and see which one performs better.
Thanks for the tip mate, i will give it a try. i dont think there was any increase in performance tbh. Think i'll just replace the other 2 sticks with the 800mhz ram too though, rather than running a 2 gig 800 mhz with 2 1 gig 667 mhz sticks. Just not sure whether to go over 4 gig total and upgrade to Vista 64, would there be any advantages or disadvantages to doing that? Thanks for the help..
I don't know much about 64bit OS', but I think they're supposed to be a bit faster. There are probably some benchmarks showing Vista 32 bit and Vista 64 bit on a Q6600, and you can decide whether it's worth the upgrade then.
