Does faster RAM really make a difference?

It’s something that not much people touch on when buying a computer. Will faster RAM really make a difference when you get down to it?

According to Microsoft, Windows Vista requires 512MB to install and run, while Windows XP requires 64MB. Now that’s a pretty big jump in megabytes! This is all fine and dandy if your’re pretty much doing nothing on your computer, but your obviously going to need more, say if your going to be running the internet, iTunes, and any other miscellaneous programs that you might want to run.

So, if you want to run all of those programs, your going to need to add more RAM.

Here’s PC Authority’s benchmark guide on RAM:

Vista vs XP: The RAM benchmarks

Vista is obviously slower than XP, so you know what that means: more RAM! You’ve got all of the new features, and the new design, so you’ve got heavier system demands. What’s the ideal amount of RAM though?

Here’s what PC Authority has to say:

For pure number-crunching, boosting memory has only a small benefit. In our audio-encoding benchmark, quadrupling Vista’s RAM from 512MB to 2GB yielded only a 1.4% speed increase. Video encoding derived a mere 5% benefit from the same upgrade. But when it came to multitasking, the benefit of more memory shone. Going up to 2GB sped things up by an astonishing 35%, and in Photoshop the improvement was more than 40%.

So how much is too much? Well, XP won’t recognise more than 3GB, so there’s no point in adding there. With Vista, 32-bit editions can address up to 4GB of RAM, but that has to include not only your system RAM but also the memory in your graphics card and other system resources. You might want to stick with a 3GB card because If you install a 4GB DIMM, you’ll find less than 3.5GB available to the system.

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