UFRAGG

With memory prices being fairly cheap, and mother boards stating that can support 4gb of memory, I wondered if I actually need .. well .. would benefit from 4gb of memory.

Short result:
WinXP 32bit will only use about 3gb to 3.5gb of a the<br>4gb system memory. For testing, I have Win2003 Server 32bit which supports 4gb by physical address extension.

Long result:
WinXP and all 32bit OS can only address 4gb of addresses; like the video card, pci, hard drives, etc. So after mapping out those addresses, then it can map out the system memory. So that leaves about 3gb to 3.5gb of address left for the system memory; The variance is based on the number of devices.

Reference: VistaClues

So on to the benchmarks ..

3DMark 06 1.1.0
It seems 4gb is a little faster.

7-Zip 4.45beta
Again, it seems 4gb is a little faster .. but not by much

CrystalMark 2004RC2
2gb seems to be a little faster on the overall score. But the 4gb is slightly faster on the MEM (memory) score and the GDI (2D drawing) score. For some reason, the 4gb is slower on the HDD (hard drive) score.

MemTach 0.93Alpha
Eh .. for some scores 4gb is faster while for others 2gb is faster.

ViMark 1.2.5
Well, the scores are essentially the same.

Well, the benchmarks showed a slight to non-improvement in going from 2gb to 4gb. At least there was not a decline in performance. I did not benchmark any games specifically, but they (BF2, R6V) played the same. Load times were a little less for repetitive maps but nothing significant.

So in short, 4gb is OK but not groundbreaking. At least for 32bit OS.

Other thoughts:
To make some use of the extra memory you might want to increase file cache timeout .. to keep files around longer in all that memory you have.
CacheManXP is a good tool to up the timeout; 3600s seems to work well.

You could also try using the extra 2gb in a ram drive and toss your swap file and temp directory for some great IO speed up. However, make sure you do not exceed you ram drive size of 2gb by extracting a large file .. say an iso or a dvd .. else the extraction will fail.