The importance of more RAM : Gator Byte

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If you’re just using a computer for internet browsing or office use, than 512mb RAM is probably all you’ll ever need. More intensive applications and games are where you’d need to consider beefing it up as much as possible. By games I don’t mean solitaire or those little things on Pogo, I mean high end games like Doom 3, Half-life 2, EverQuest 2, Vanguard, Airborn, Battlefield 2142 and so on. Having a fast video card just isn’t enough to make up for a lack of RAM.

To illustrate my point, my work computer is a Pentium 4 3.0ghz with 512mb RAM and a Radeon X800XT 256mb video card. Still a pretty good system for gaming, but the RAM is low. At home I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+, 2gb RAM and a Radeon X1950PRO 256mb video. I play EverQuest 2 mostly these days, and at home I can play it on rather high details but I’m a little limited by the CPU. At work, it’s only playable if I turn the graphics settings all the way down, and even then it still takes minutes to load zones, rather than seconds. The screenshots below are what it looks like at work (dark & dingy), and at home (bright and detailed), on playable settings.