Adding RAM to x24

[PHall1007]

Hi, I currently have 256MB RAM on a 1.13GHz x24. Will maxing out the RAM to 640MB give me a massive increase in performance, or will it be limited by other components?

If I'm right, the x24 takes PC133 144pin SODIMM SDRAM. 512MB modules seem to sell for about £50 ($90) on eBay. Does anyone know anywhere I can get it any cheaper? As far as I can see though, this seems a pretty good price.

Cheers.

[Mack]

I have 640 Mb RAM in mine, I added a 512 Mb Crucial stick. It will give you a very good performance increase. You can also use a 7200 rpm harddrive, that will make your machine a lot faster I think. (assuming you have the standard 4200 rpm hd in it now)

[rwmannco]

I have a 1Ghz X24, upgraded in two stages to 640Mb (from 256) and to a 7K100/16mb cache drive (from a 4K30/2mb cache) and it indeed got far more spritely at each stage.

Interesting too, that the 2nd gen 7K drive has not caused battery endurance to suffer, which was a worry.

[Nykra]

What's more important - RPM speed or cache?

[rwmannco]

I would guess that it depends on the data being accessed. In theory, higher RPM should improve access time across the disk surface, files or fragments, while larger cache should improve large file streaming (video, audio, graphics). Other than the empirical observation that "it works", just a guess, though.

[PHall1007]

I've added the extra RAM and so I now have 640Mb instead of the 256MB I had before. To be honest, I haven't seen a huge difference in performance. I had been having some problems with virtual memory before and messed around with the settings. Could this have affected it?

Are there any other settings on the x24 that I could change to optimize the RAM? Does anyone know of a good way of testing the performance of my RAM and see if it actually is performing as well as it could. I have a feeling it might just be that I'm not pushing it hard enough to see much of a difference yet.

[aceo07]

While it's good to have a decent amount of RAM (512MB), it is not the slowest part of a computer. The harddrive is. What speed is your harddrive?


Just leave your virtual memory setting to auto. Defragment your hardrive and see how it goes.

[pianowizard]

I think that for most applications, increasing from 64MB, 96MB or 128MB to 256MB usually gives very obvious improvements, but the benefits of increasing from 256MB to higher capacities are more subtle.

[Mack]

I have disabled page file. My comp seems more alert that way.