How much memory do i need?

[droolian01]

Hello all.

I will be going out tommorrow morning and getting all the bits to build my super speedy encoding box. My present box is a celeron 800 on a crappy jetway mobo.

I will be going for:

Athlon xp2100+
asus a7v333raid
ibm 120gxp 40 gb (boot)
ibm 120gxp 123gb (mainly capture)
Sapphire ATI Radeon 9000 64MB DDR
winxp pro

I will be using this rig mainly for capture with a cheap pcrave tv card and for encoding to divx. The question is i can get (tommorrow) Corsair xms3000 memory (cas2 and rated at fsb 185 - incase i want to do some moderate overclocking later) but do i get 256 or 512mb? You see i've pushed the boat out a little with all this and will i really see a big difference in encoding speed if i get the 256mb stick?

If the difference in speed is significant i may go ahead and get the 512mb - it's cheaper to but that way than 2x256mb anyway.

Any thoughts and comments would be appreciated
Thanks

[MaDmiZe]

Memory is one of the best performance per dollar items you can get for any speed pc. That said ...the more the merrier.

[mh2360]

Yep!, your PC can NEVER have too much memory!!!. Get as much memory as your motherboard will allow...

[droolian01]

Thanks.
Yeah - i know more memory is the best way to go, especially if you have around 512mb plus and disable windows 'virtual memory' - can get a useful speed increase having no swap file when capturing.
With win98 i would be happy to put up with 256mb for these jobs - untill funds increase, but i think that winxp pro will be more 'memory hungry' ( i have no experience of winxp - only win98).
So winxp gurus out there - will having 256mb hurt my encoding times much?

Thanks again

[Mirror_Image]

Thanks.
will having 256mb hurt my encoding times much?

No, it won't...nor will 512 help it much. When encoding video, the overwhelming factor is CPU power, of which you will have plenty.

[Greg12]

XP needs at least 256, u can get by with 128, (which i have) but XP chokes sometimes.

I would recomind at least 256 for Windows XP

And Yes, if u can get a alot of ram, instruct the computer to load it's whole OS into the ram and not the virtual ram.

[droolian01]

Thanks everyone for the advice.
I caved in instantly to the salesman - they had run out of the 512mb ddr3000 but he offered me the ddr3200 for the same price! So thats what i got. Problem now is that i havent got enough screws to mount my 2 hard drives and the shops are shut!!! It'll have to be built tomorrow.

[mh2360]

Do what i always do, simply borrow two screws from another drive. Two screws are more than enough to hold a drive in...