More memory = Better performance, real world test
Posted on 12. Dec, 2008 by Mike Halsey in hardware
Previously I’ve written about how adding memory to your computer is the cheapest and fastest way to get a performance boots from it. You can read the article here. Recently I’ve upgraded the memory on my own PC from 2Gb to 4Gb, so I thought I’d share the findings with you here.
To get a good review of this I started with only 1Gb of memory in the machine and each time I started the machine from cold (ie. completely switched off). Each time, the test was how many seconds it took before I got a ‘working’ desktop. The results are below.
1Gb – 1 minutes 33 seconds
2Gb – 1 minute 14 seconds
4Gb – 59½ seconds
With each lot of additional memory Windows is speedier too. I don’t have proper benchmarking software but the start-up time is a good indication of how things run after that. Memory hungry applications such as Windows Media Centre are now running considerably faster with the additional memory installed.
The results are a clear demonstration of how impressive speed gains can be achieved from, and this is the good news, 1Gb of memory can now be bought for as little as £15 including VAT.
Remember that it’s only worth upgrading past 3Gb if you are running a 64 bit version of Windows. The 32 bit versions and all versions of XP can only see a maximum of 4Gb which includes the memory on your graphics card.
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