I am currently operating Windows2000 with 384MB of SDRAM. Due to the extremely cheap memory prices, I got credit card crazy and bought two 256MB SDRAM sticks. I will be upgrading my system to 768MB of RAM. I have always thought that the more RAM the better, and the faster.
However, I am seeing mixed opinions on the internet about how much RAM is necessarily good. I hear that 256 is optimal some places and that more RAM decreases performance on games and such.

Whats the real deal on RAM?

I bet you've got a nice system. Probably a P3 600mhz or greater, or an athlon equivalent.

The 256Mb thing you're referring to is with respect to windows 98. Win98 has abysmal memory managment. Windows2k on the other hand, is a godsend in comparison.

Put the fact that current Athlon and Pentium III chipsets have cacheable support for > 768Mb, and thatyou're running win2k, you're fine. You'll see no slowdown, and if you were really worried about it, you could learn how to set up a ram disk (I don't know how ), and run your games out of that! (that beats the snot out of running it from disk).

Just for reference, on old Socket 7 motherboards with the TX chipset, if you went over 64Mb, you'd see a performance DECREASE on apps that use < 64Mb, due to the system not being able to cache all the ram. However, for applications that require > 64Mb of ram, they ran faster with > 64Mb of ram despite the "slowdown", because even with the negative impact, RAM is still faster than paging out to the hard drive!

And, if you were that worried about gaming performance, you'd stick with 256Mb of ram in windows98SE, because Win2k isn't as fast for gaming (especially with ATI Radeon cards! But, even Geforce chips have degraded performance in most cases).

Hope this helps, because I'm procrastinating on my program even more to help

Thanks Paul for your informative reply.

I now look forward to installing a total of 768MB of RAM into my W2k system. You bet I had a PIII or an Athlon, well currently I have Socket 7 EPOX MVP3G5 (VIA MVP3 Chipset with 2MB Onboard Cache) with a K6-III+ Mobile Processor overclocked from 450MHZ to 600MHZ.

When I bought this RAM, among many other things, I bought it with the future intention of upgrading the MotherBoard and Processor to an Athlon Thunderbird setup in the near future. I figure once the AMD Palamino is released on May 15th, prices for KT133a MoBo's and Athlon processors should slowly decline. But in the meantime, I figured this RAM upgrade would do wonders for this system, and be benificial to the future setup. My brother has an Athlon system and I definitely see the difference in Processing power over my K6-III+.

Setting up a RAM disk sounds absolutely fabulous! I'll have to research more on that. You have helped, thanks again Paul.

Well, with the K6-III, and K6-2+ and K6-3+, you're covered

The original K6 and K6-2's were dependant upon the chipeset (and the amount of L2 cache) for the amount of cacheable ram. I think the board you have can cache a great deal of ram (I'm guessing 256Mb?) because of the additional L2 cache. However, since the K6 family got ondie cache, there are enough cache tags to support all your RAM needs

I found a small article about using a ramdrive to store IE's cache, I don't know if it'll help, but it's here:

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/axcel216/index.htm

In the menu on the left, look for Win 98 tricks, then on the new main page, look for:

5-4-99 Win9x/IE Original Registry ŠTrick: BROWSER CACHE IN MEMORY

Hope this helps!

I have found that using 512 MB of ram offers great performance in a kt1333 platform

Damn! I'll bet! Man, If I could run my system bus at 1333MHz, I'd be getting great performance too! Heh...I could get an unlocked Thunderbird and set its clock multiplier to...x1!

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

I was initally running W2K with 256MB PC-133 on my A7V (800Mhz T-Bird), and recently put another 256MB chip in for a total of 512MB (Half-a-Gig). Dang. I thought is was going to be overkill, but for $30 it was surely worth every dime.

With Win2K, the more RAM the better (in theory of course). But overkill is allways a possibility as previously posted.

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Win2K loves it's ram.

Overkill really only happens in Win98. 256 seems to be
a happy spot for Win98.

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Serious Soldier