64 bit Win 7 and 3GB ram. Good for Dolphin or not?

[tbird79]

I'm curious if it would be worthwhile for me to install Win 7 x64 on my pc. I only have 3GB of ram, although I can add more later. The reason I am considering doing this is so I can play F-Zero GX at full speed, as the x86 Dolphin is only running it at half speed right now due to some issue in 32 bit, apparently.

Would I need more than 3GB ram for F-Zero to run at full speed? Also, would other games also require more ram in x64 than in x86, thus making the move to x64 a bad decision with this amount of ram?

System specs are:

Core2Duo E8500 @ 3.16Ghz
3GB DDR2 800 (2x1gb sticks, 2x512mb sticks)
GTS 250 1gb
WD 7200 rpm caviar blue, 16mb cache
Currently running Vista SP2 x86

[RDilus]

3gb is fine for win 7 x64

[Ocean]

It's enough ram, but it will be running in single channel since it's asymmetric & you will very likely gain no speed boost in any apps or games if you switch to a 64-bit OS.

For futureproofing your system (if you decide to buy more RAM for example), it wont hurt to get win7 x64.

[thaCASHdude]

i say go for it since you can add more ram later

[tbird79]

(04-05-2010, 03:51 AM)Ocean Wrote: It's enough ram, but it will be running in single channel since it's asymmetric & you will very likely gain no speed boost in any apps or games if you switch to a 64-bit OS.

For futureproofing your system (if you decide to buy more RAM for example), it wont hurt to get win7 x64.

why would it run in single channel in x64 if it runs in dual channel in x86? I have all 4 ram slots being used. Am I missing something in regards to x64?

[acenima]

tbird go for it and upgrade to windows 7 x64 it runs great with the x64 dolphin, and 3gb is enough.

[tbird79]

Ok so I've looked into this asymmetrical ram configuration a bit. I see that I'd be better off with 4 1gb sticks, which I can definitely do in the future.

I guess my question now is, will this asymmetrical setup of ram be much of a hit, performance wise, with Dolphin? One site I was on said that asymmetric ram like my setup was faster than single channel but still slower than dual channel. Can anyone attest to that?

[Ocean]

Sorry I explained too hastily.. Unless you have all memory sticks running at the same nominal frequency and latency they are in single channel mode even if cpu-z reports dual or even triple-channel. The BIOS reveals how it runs.

You can't run different sizes and frequencies, timings/latency (like 2x1gb @800mhz, 2x256mb@667mhz) in dual channel mode.

Not that it matters that much speed wise, just pointing that out. It wont really matter for dolphin. I've tried 2 configs: 4x2gb corsair ddr3 sticks, and 2x2gb+4x1gb (which would show up as single channel in bios, falsely 3 in cpu-z), neither one made a difference in dolphin, and 3dmark06 showed really no improvement at all..

[Khentix]

There's no point in upgrading to x64 if you only have 3gb of ram. There would be no difference in speed between x64 and x86, the only reason x64 is more widely used now is because x86(32bit) is capped at a maximum of 4gb of ram, but even if you have 4gb of ram, it'll only show 3.4ish because some of your memory gets allocated to your hardware.

Don't bother upgrading until you have a reason to do so, the big upgrade about x64 is it can handle 128GB(That'd be nice wouldn't it) of RAM, instead of just 4GB. Your machine cuts memory in half, between the user and the system. So if you have 3gb, the user and system would get 1.5GB each. You can change the PAE switch to allow the system only 1gb while you get 2gb, but that would also have little effect considering the maximum amount of ram a x86 application is permitted to use is 2GB. Get some more RAM, yo.

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And late edit; Ocean, you can run different frequencies and timings in dual-channel. What will happen though is the faster ram (in terms of frequency and timing) will slow down to match the speed of the slower ram. So it still comes with it's disadvantages, but you could run a DDR2800 and DDR2667 in Dual-channel, DDR2800 would just bring itself down to DDR2667.

[tbird79]

Thanks for the replies. I've decided to forgo upgrading to x64 for now and instead I ordered a new PSU. I'm slowly upgrading my machine; next thing will be the ram, (gonna get 4x2gb ,but only install 2 sticks until I get Win7 x64).