Photoshop CS w/P4 840 EE

We're still working on standardizing this benchmark, but Photoshop is probably one of the biggest ram hogs on the market. A few years ago when I studied Graphic Design, the word was any file you edit in Photoshop, multiply the size of the file by 5 and that's how much ram you need. I took a 6MP, 40MB file and ran 15 filters through it. The time it took (minutes, seconds) was what was recorded and lower times are better.

Finally, some results! The extra ram nets a 30 second improvement in Photoshop performance, which is huge. How does this affect multimedia applications?

Windows Media Encoder 9 w/P4 840 EE

Again, big gains if you're into video editing.

Final Words

At the same clock speeds and memory timings, you won't find much difference in the way of ram performance. There will be variables, but nothing to write home about. The same may be said about the move from 1GB to 2GB, but this is a more complicated situation than one may expect.

Gaming is not impacted much at all with additional ram. Yes, there were improvements, and we can probably attribute this to the extra gig of memory. Some games, specifically Battlefield 2 showed larger improvements, and seeing as to how it's no secret that this game is ram hungry, picking up additional memory would probably be a wise move if you're a fan of this game. Given that serious gamers are so focussed on performance, tweaking application startups, optimizing driver settings, etc., adding more ram may not give the improvement across all games as one may hope.

Editor's Note: Shortly after going to press, we had a talk with Corsair regarding the 1GB to 2GB debate in gaming. We pointed out that there was some improvement, but not as much as Corsair had published. They had this to say:

He is using an ATI video card; we have seen the same result in the lab. You get the improvement with Nvidia, but not with ATI. And, based on expected numbers, the ATI is "always slow", rather than "always fast", while Nvidia is "fast" with 2GB and "slow" with 1GB. If that makes any sense...

To be honest, I've never quite thought of that as the X850 Platinum Edition has always been a speedy card, but we do still have our MSI 7800GTX in the labs here, so we fired it up in our P4 560 system and walked away with these results in Battlefield 2:

At 1024x768, again, improvements are minimal, but once we start scaling upwards we can see the additional ram coming into play, especially at 1600x1200. We did not see these results with the ATI card, and while I'm still not sure how NVIDIA gets handicapped at 1GB, the 7800GTX definitely benefits with more system ram in the PC. On a side note, we saw a 2% improvement in our UT2004 numbers, so provided you have NVIDIA hardware, 2GB is certainly beneficial. How about ATI's X1000 family? Our hardware is still on the way, but we're hoping we will see a similar bell curve with that card.

Applications on the other hand are a different story. Realistically, most of us do a lot of multitasking on a daily basis. With multiple windows open, the more ram you have the smoother the experience. While the Photoshop and Windows Media Encoder benchmarks show improvement, unless you're actually witnessing first hand day-to-day use with more ram, it's hard to demonstrate how useful more memory really is to the overall experience. I normally keep Photoshop on all the time, flipping back and forth with IE, Word and Dreamweaver. I don't really practice what I preach and I can go days without reboots. On a 1GB setup, I will notice some pauses with screen draws after a long period, but this does not seem to happen as much with 2GB of ram. Now, if all you do is web surf and type the occasional Word document, having 2GB of ram handy is a bit of a waste, but more ram will provide some headroom for the future, especially if you plan on using your system with Microsoft Vista.

In regards to the Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400 PRO itself, the memory is Corsair's usual high quality stuff. Performance is on par with the Ballistix kit, winning some, losing some, and is a good overclocker. This is pretty important for those of you still using 915P/925X based boards where 533MHz is the current official ceiling, so there's plenty of headroom to move upwards. One thing to point out though is your overclocking success will vary depending on the hardware setup you have.

At about for the 2GB kit, the Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400 PRO is not cheap (but you get a lifetime warranty). Corsair does offer a , so if you're not in the need for 2GB of ram, we invite you to go that route.

Pros: Good performance, activity LEDs, quality construction, lifetime warranty and 2GB of ram!

Cons: 2GB improvements will vary depending on hardware (gaming specifically).

Bottom Line: It'll be up to the user whether or not the extra gigabyte over the "standard" is worth the money for their purposes. Gaming will see some impact from additional memory (hate to sound like a fanboy, but it looks like you'll need NVIDIA hardware for now), but certain applications, especially anything related to multimedia, will benefit greatly.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

HOME