Upgrading Ram

[Cream Soda]

Was thinking of upgrading my ram (since my friend says it'll make my computer faster with less lag). I was wondering if anyone could explain in lamens terms exactly what ram does and would it be worth the 30 dollars to upgrade from 512mb to 2 gigs. Would it be a noticeable diff?

[Shuemue]

would definitely be worthwhile, in the easiest possible terms, think of ram like short term memory

[Cephius]

In short, RAM is the memory location where programs are loaded into when they run. If you run out of accessible ram, your computer slows to a crawl. These days, 2 gigs of ram is pretty much standard for any computer that does more than basic word processing and web browsing. Going from 512MB, it's not a stretch to say you'll notice a huge difference in performance.

[Shuemue]

Think of your hard drive like your bank account, and your ram like your wallet. Do you want a wallet that can only hold a few bucks? Or one with BAD MOTHERFUCKER written on it?

[Kohan]

Do it. As they said, going from 512MB to 2GB is a very big jump.

Also, find out if your motherboard supports dual channel. If it does, buy two 1GB sticks instead of a single 2GB stick.

[Epical]

512MB to 2GB is DEFINITELY worth it -- do it.

[Cream Soda]

Alright, put the order in tonight, and yes, its x2 1 gig sticks (mine currently has x2 252 mb sticks).

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Will this help with DL at all? Everytime I do DL, ppl start to pop 2hrs and i catch a huge lag spike and before I can do anything the fights over, lol.

[Kohan]

This will help, but keep in mind that FFXI is a CPU-intensive application. More than anything else, the potency of your CPU regulates how well FFXI will perform. This is why people with SLI/Crossfire configurations--those with multiple graphics cards working together at once--don't see significantly higher performance gains than someone with a single, top-of-the-line card and a powerful processor.

[Cream Soda]

Well, at least I don't have some integrated shit. I have a Radeon X-600, which I think works fine for FFXI. Not sure of the CPU, could let u know if you told me how to check it.

[fantasticdan]

You can check your processor from system properties. You can get there from control panel or just right clicking the 'my computer' icon on your desktop.

[Cream Soda]

Pentium 4 2.80 ghz

[Kohan]

By today's standards, 2.8GHz is fairly slow. Although a lot of modern dual and quad core processors report lower or similar speeds, this is per core, which makes a tremendous amount of difference. Really, GHz isn't a great thing to measure performance by as much nowadays, but continuing to talk about that would be getting into an unnecessary tangent.

You are definitely far above FFXI's minimum requirements--an 800MHz processor--but its "recommended requirements" mention a P4, and that's a standard outdated by several years.

So, the short of it: you'll see an improvement with the RAM and there is no reason to not upgrade, but you are limited by your CPU and thus FFXI performance may not change drastically.

EDIT: A highly recommended method of increasing FFXI performance is turning off the sound (not turning it down in-game, but turning it off in the config GUI before starting it up).