What is best upgrade to do?

[Dellguy]

Yes, a gamer wouldn't have integrated graphics to begin with so it's safe to assume that the OP is not asking how to make his games faster. However, RAM is *always* a good upgrade when using linux. It doesn't matter if you have 512M or 4G. More is better. Always. (Well, except when your RAM size starts to approach the amount of information stored on your disks).

Like I wrote before it depends on what he is using his PC for. 4gigs is a complete waste of money if he just surfs the web.


A gamer wouldn't be using Ubuntu either. I'm not sure why you mentioned them in your first post but I had to clarify because your post is misleading.

Ubuntu uses free ram to cache files read from the disk and this drastically improves the speed of your machine

So if I have 1Gig of RAM adding another 10 Gigs is really going to make web pages load drastically faster? I don't think so.

If we are really worried about Hard drive speed then we would just buy a WD Velociraptor.

Ram is always good to have.

Money is always good to have too.

[Skripka]

Yes, a gamer wouldn't have integrated graphics to begin with so it's safe to assume that the OP is not asking how to make his games faster. However, RAM is *always* a good upgrade when using linux. It doesn't matter if you have 512M or 4G. More is better. Always. (Well, except when your RAM size starts to approach the amount of information stored on your disks).

More RAM is better-but it depends on where the bottleneck is in the system. If your system is not paging much at all-you'll barely notice more RAM.

For a system with only 512RAM, RAM is where I'd start--512 RAM is barely enough for any current OS (Mac or Windows, although Linux can be made to work under it by turning things off). Integrated graphics tend to be a joke-that is the second item I'd worry about.

[nick09]

A gamer can use Ubuntu, they just use Windows to play their favorite games.

[jerome1232]

A gamer wouldn't be using Ubuntu either. I'm not sure why you mentioned them in your first post but I had to clarify because your post is misleading.

I have to argue that point, I may not be a "hardcore" gamer. But Linux has enough fun titles to keep me interested, when my Linux box is not transcoding dvd's it's running ET:QW's or WoW via wine. There are enough fun Open Source games to play around with.

For the average user more ram trumps the video card. I don't even have to think about that, most video cards that ship these days can handle 3d acceleration and that's all the average desktop user needs. More ram=bigger cache=less disk access.

[Rohan Kapoor]

I have to argue that point, I may not be a "hardcore" gamer. But Linux has enough fun titles to keep me interested, when my Linux box is not transcoding dvd's it's running ET:QW's or WoW via wine. There are enough fun Open Source games to play around with.

For the average user more ram trumps the video card. I don't even have to think about that, most video cards that ship these days can handle 3d acceleration and that's all the average desktop user needs. More ram=bigger cache=less disk access.

Ditto

[Rohan Kapoor]

Money is always good to have too.

If he's upgrading, he's bound to have money!

[Dellguy]

If he's upgrading, he's bound to have money!

Very funny kid. I have money too... but I don't like to waste it. I don't tell other people to waste theirs either. I would hate to see the OP or anyone else run out and buy 8gigs for RAM thinking it will "drastically improve the speed of their machine" then come back pissed because its doesn't help a thing.

I have to argue that point, I may not be a "hardcore" gamer. But Linux has enough fun titles to keep me interested, when my Linux box is not transcoding dvd's it's running ET:QW's or WoW via wine. There are enough fun Open Source games to play around with.

Everyone has their own definitions. Gamer is a term I use to describe what you call "hardcore" gamer. fyi... playing WoW 16hrs a day doesn't mean you're a gamer either IMO. It means your a user that has problems

If your not a "hardcore" gamer then you're just a user that likes to play games... and I don't mean that in a bad way. Theirs nothing wrong with that.

For the average user more ram trumps the video card. I don't even have to think about that, most video cards that ship these days can handle 3d acceleration and that's all the average desktop user needs. More ram=bigger cache=less disk access.

I'm guessing the OP's system was assembled at least 4 years ago. Most average users buy PCs that have more or at least 1Gig of RAM nowadays.

I agree that 512mb is not enough RAM but the caching argument is stupid.

Hard drives are fast enough for average users needs. If we are really worried about Hard drive performance then we would buy a better hard drive like a WD Velociraptor... not RAM.

[sdennie]

Hard drives are fast enough for average users needs. If we are really worried about Hard drive performance then we would buy a better hard drive like a WD Velociraptor... not RAM.

You are simply wrong on this point. The hard drive is by far the slowest part of the machine. Upgrading to a faster hard drive still makes it orders of magnitude slower than RAM. Having more RAM and using something like preload or just letting the cache grow naturally does indeed make your machine much, much faster. More RAM means a more responsive machine. That's not a fact that can be argued.

[jerome1232]

Hard drives are fast enough for average users needs. If we are really worried about Hard drive performance then we would buy a better hard drive like a WD Velociraptor... not RAM.

Maybe if you have 8 of them all in a stripping raid array...

More ram has nothing do with hard disk performance, rather it has to do with not having to access the disk so much. Hard disk access times will NEVER be close to what ram access times are, ever.

I really don't think my caching argument is stupid. Especially in the OP's case, going from 512 MB of ram to say 1 GB will be a considerable difference. Especially once he get's his music player going and all 20 of his firefox tabs. Video card won't do a thing for that, neither will a fast hard disk drive.

Hard Disks have always been A bottleneck yes. I remember when I switched from pata to sata drives my OS load time plummeted, I noticed a difference in initial load time of larger applications as well. However once the os is started up, things have become cached and apps are loaded it's ram you are now relying on. You know when you have alot of apps open or a few resource intensive apps open and you swtich to a different app and you get your hard drive crunching hard for a few seconds then the app finally loads? That's what happens when some of your memory in ram got swapped out. That's the difference between ram speeds and hdd speeds.

[sdennie]

I will agree with jerome1232 and further add that "slow" is often caused by latency. Getting information is slow from disk so your OS caches disk reads, getting information from RAM is slow so the L2 cache caches information from RAM. Parts of your computer are slow. Caches exist to hide the latency from getting information from them. The larger your caches, the less latency you will notice. That's why adding RAM (and indirectly increasing the size of the disk cache) is always beneficial.