Does Vista 64 REALLY need more than 2GB of RAM

[WhiteLotus]

I have 2GB of DDR3 in specs, and will be going to vista (finally) should i need another set of RAM. Do I NEED it?

 

[zaqwsx]

I suggest 4gb of ram that what im running with vista 64. If I ran anything lower my oc would be crap I use like 3gb of the 4 when I run a few programs and a game. But for some reason vista just eats at my ram idk why.

Edit: Vista 64 idle mem usage is about 1.25gb to 1.50gb for me also

 

[mlee49]

Yes, I wish I had a screen shot of my idle Vista mem usage. I would sit a 1.25GB used at any random time. In game it shot up to 2+ easy. 4GB is great, 3GB is good, 2GB is just enough.

 

[ASRockIQ]

it depends what you are doing. simple browsering the web, e-mail, photo editing, etc. use 2GB

gaming would suggest 4GB or more

 

[ShadowFold]

2gb for me is lagging like asssssssss. Needs 4gb or more for multitasking and gaming. Everything else is fine.

 

[DrPepper]

You don't NEED it. My laptop runs with 1gb and its fine. When your gaming you will want about 4gb or more but again you don't need it. I'd get more ram even DDR3 since its quite cheap now.

 

[farlex85]

Of course you don't need it. I would certainly recommend it though.

 

[department76]

i ran 2gb with vista ultimate and it simpy WASN'T enough to game. back then i played cod4 religiously, and the game would slow down to a crawl every few minutes while it loaded from the hdd. after upgrading to 4gb, that problem went away entirely.

sure everything will run with 2gb, but not well.

 

[freaksavior]

no, i ran vista ultimate x64 on 1gb ram. it ran smooth as silk. i couldn't do much as far as multimedia and gaming but it worked for everything else

 

[WhiteLotus]

ah ok cool thanks guys. I game occasionally so i make the switch, then if the performance lags i will invest in some more.

 

[freaksavior]

ah ok cool thanks guys. I game occasionally so i make the switch, then if the performance lags i will invest in some more.

yeah gaming, i would go with 4 but just browsing then yes, 2 is fine

 

[MadClown]

I game occasionally

LIES!!!!!!!!

I idle at ~1.25 GB also, so thats about 12-15% ram, no biggie for me.

 

[WhiteLotus]

LIES!!!!!!!!

I idle at ~1.25 GB also, so thats about 12-15% ram, no biggie for me.

no i do game occasionally. Why would i lie about that?

 

[Scheich]

2gb are fine for occasional gaming. Your gfx is only 512mb.
Most people chose 4-8 gb to avoid rebooting every 4-6 hours,
i guess. At least i do

 

[CyberDruid]

The idle amount of RAM is going to vary depending on how much RAM you have installed. Try it. Put in 1 GB of RAM and open Task Manager. You will see about 1/2 GB being "used" at idle. Put in 8 GB and see how much is used at idle: about 2GB.

Likewise at load you will rarely see anywhere near 100% no matter how little or how much because Vista will shift the prefetch to disk if there is not enough free memory.

Vista calculates how much prefetch it can load into RAM based on the total available RAM.

What I found is that if you have a powerful GFX card and powerful processor and reasonable HDD Vista will run pretty good on a small amount of RAM. The Aero features are pretty much GFX dependent. There are a number of tweaks you can do to optimize your installation of Vista if it seems laggy.

 

[mlee49]

The idle amount of RAM is going to vary depending on how much RAM you have installed. Try it. Put in 1 GB of RAM and open Task Manager. You will see about 1/2 GB being "used" at idle. Put in 8 GB and see how much is used at idle: about 2GB.

Likewise at load you will rarely see anywhere near 100% no matter how little or how much because Vista will shift the prefetch to disk if there is not enough free memory.

Vista calculates how much prefetch it can load into RAM based on the total available RAM.

What I found is that if you have a powerful GFX card and powerful processor and reasonable HDD Vista will run pretty good on a small amount of RAM. The Aero features are pretty much GFX dependent. There are a number of tweaks you can do to optimize your installation of Vista if it seems laggy.

Really..... seriously is that true? Can anyone validate?

Sorry I'm skeptical but not trying to be a douce.

 

[Papahyooie]

I say cyberdruid is right (though i dont have any links to back it up atm) because I ran vista on a desktop with 1gb of ram. Idle was ~200mb of ram at any given moment, and vista ran just fine. Then I had a toshiba laptop with 2gb of ram. Idle could get up to 512 or even more mb of ram, vista still ran fine. Now on my my asus laptop with 4gb of ram it can get up to 2 gb at idle! However, even crysis at high doesnt stutter, and on my little lcd screen that shows ram usage it never gets even close to 80% used so I assume vista throttles back the prefetch in the ram and whatnot so that it can be used for currently running programs. Also, vista itself is silky smooth, and programs open super fast. So im assuming like cyberdruid says, the prefetch uses up as much ram as it can justify so your programs can open faster, then throttles it back when you game or multitask heavily.

Plus Im pretty sure it says all this in the bragging section of the microsoft website for vista.

 

[farlex85]

Really..... seriously is that true? Can anyone validate?

Sorry I'm skeptical but not trying to be a douce.

What do you want for validation, try what he said. It's true, I've seen it since Vista was in beta. Vista's ram use is dynamic based on availability.

 

[Papahyooie]

The way i see it, people just think vista is a resource hog because they see 50% ram used at idle, then dont think to check what the ram used is when they are gaming (not over 70% usually in my experience) and multitasking (even lower). The ram usage is defininitely dynamic.

 

[newtekie1]

I have 2 machines with Vista x64 currently running 2GB. Both run smooth as silk, and both see gaming use(though not so much anymore on the x800XL rig...).

 

[mlee49]

What do you want for validation, try what he said. It's true, I've seen it since Vista was in beta. Vista's ram use is dynamic based on availability.

Source links would be great Currently I'm not using Vista, but I'd like to know more about this.

 

[DaMulta]

I have played every top game ( but GTA4 have not gotten around to it) in vista 64 with only 2gb of ram.

vista handles memory better than XP you don't really need more than two in most cases ATM

Now there are visual MODS for some PC games that you can install that will want 4Gb of ram.


Granted I have gamed with a QX9650 sli 8800GT / Triple SLi 9800GTX this year, but only had 2GB installed the WHOLE TIME. Never ever did I hit the run out of memory choppiness.


You want a little extra ram? Just install a USB drive Vista will use it as memory lol

If you buy DDR3 get 16000 chips or faster! memory is cheap now a days don't skimp on it IMO!

 

[CyberDruid]

It's sort of like a RAM disk...and when you put the PC to "sleep" or "hibernate" all the apps, web pages, everything goes into RAM...so it flashes to life instantly when you wake up the rig. And when running it uses RAM to hold whatever it "guesses" you or the apps will be pulling up

Basically you can't have too much RAM with Vista...or too little

 

[newtekie1]

Vista is designed to use about 55-60% of your memory when sitting idle. It pre-fetches programs into RAM that it thinks you might use, when the memory used by this pre-fetching is needed it simply dumps those programs out of RAM and frees up the space for use almost instantly.

 

[DaMulta]

Windows 7 even handles it better than Vista does(at least the first betas did...)

Install windows 7. It's windows 2008 server more or less. WHICH IS A SWEET OS only thing is that it does not have DX10 installed in it. IDK if you can install DX10 inside windows 2008.

98>2000(based on NT)>XP fixed (also based off advanced server/windows 2000)>Vista(based on windows 2003>Windows 7 based on windows 2008.