City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

RAM Upgrade Question

Cade Lawson

By Cade Lawson,
Posted on: 2009-11-22 06:43 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs

 

Posted

Hey guys,

With the approach (albeit slow and stealthy) of GR, I'm entertaining the idea of upgrading my personal machine. It's nothing terribly fance - a Dell Inspiron 530s I picked up...oh...about two years ago now. I've also decided I'd like to try my hand at building my own custom rig, though I'll admit my knowledge on the subject is purely pedestrian (I anticipate a fair amount of research in my not-so-distant future). It seemed a reasonable thing, to me, to begin with something fairly basic...RAM.

Anyway, I've been doing some reading and the general vibe I'm getting is that my best bet is to pick up two matched sticks (I'm thinking 1GB per); the debate, in my price range, seems to be between Corsair and Kingston HyperX.

I found this particular item:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16820134065

Which seems to be a pretty reasonable deal. Anyone with a little more experience than me care to offer some insights, opinions, or warnings?

Thanks.

Stealth edit: I should add:

------------------
System Information
------------------
Machine name: INSPIRON530S
Operating System: Windows Vista™ Home Basic (6.0, Build 6001) Service Pack 1 (6001.vistasp1_gdr.090805-0102)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
System Model: Inspiron 530s
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2160 @ 1.80GHz (2 CPUs), ~1.8GHz
Memory: 1012MB RAM
Page File: 961MB used, 1771MB available
Windows Dir: C:\Windows
DirectX Version: DirectX 10
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
DxDiag Version: 6.00.6001.18000 32bit Unicode


Updated with on-hand specs.

 

Posted

I'd recommend going to http://www.crucial.com/index.aspx and running the scanner there. It will tell you just what you have in your system.

If it is indeed the DDR2 800 that you linked to, then that one has a nice low latency number, and should work well.

It might not be a whole lot more money to use 2Gb chips - you might look at what they have, compared to your system specs, and see what the most economical route would be. I notice NewEgg has 82 products in the DDR2 800 category, so plenty to look at.

If you can swing 4 Gb of Ram, you'll be about as good as you can get without running a 64-bit version of windows.

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Posted

Thanks for the response DE - that's a neat little tool. I'm happy to see that it displayed exactly what I thought it would (which means I've clearly understood everything I've read). I checked out some of the offerings on Crucial's site, and I don't see any appreciable difference between them and components I linked to in my OP - except, of course, the price. The one I've linked to is listed in Canadian dollars which makes it the more economical choice.

Two questions in follow-up:

- Anything to be concerned about with the component I've linked to? I've read through the reviews, but I'm always game for a little anecdotal evidence.

- What should I be looking at for a solid graphics card these days?

 

Posted

The Dell you listed seems underpowered for CoH. The processor is okay, but pretty much the minimum you'd want to get. And with Vista, you're going to need at least two GB of Ram, three or four would be better. (I'm surprised that Dell hasn't upgraded to Win 7 yet, which from what I've heard actually needs less RAM to run well.)

What graphics card does that computer have? I couldn't find it in the listing. The graphics card recommendations for CoH are 1) a separate card, not an "integrated graphics solution", 2) a card with a model number of 6 or above as the second number, and 3) the most recent card you can afford. IIRC, the model numbers of the newest cards from Nvidia start with "2", but 9 or even 8 would be fine as long as the second number is 6 or above. For ATI, look for a model number starting with 4 or 3; "4" model cards are the newest.

EDIT: D'oh! Just realized that's the system you have, not one you're looking at. Yes, adding RAM should help a lot. Ram is very cheap these days, so if your comp will take more than 2 GB, I'd get it. You might also want to consider upgrading to Win 7.

As I said, I can't tell what sort of graphics card you have, but if you're thinking of upgrading, the advice above applies. However, with a machine that old, I wouldn't buy a top-of-line card since the CPU speed will always be something of a restriction. Unless, of course, you want to buy a card that you can move to a new machine in the not-too-distant future.

Regarding the Kingston memory, as long as you know it fits in your computer, it should be fine. Kingston is a well known company, no reason to think it won't work.

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Posted

You may wish to run the CoH Helper and post the results. It's found here .


The memory you linked to is a great one, good, low latency numbers, reputable manufacturer.

The Helper will provide info on your video card, driver, and settings, so people may be able to provide more help from those results.

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Posted

An upgrade from 1GB of RAM is well worth it. With my old system, going from 1GB to 2GB gave a significant performance increase (especially when zoning or visiting Wentworth's), even though I had to underclock my CPU by 25% to get the extra memory to work reliably.