Well remember, the more RAM you have available, the more the OS and the apps in it will suck up - that is, after all, why you get more RAM - so your apps have more playing room.

I mean when I edit on my 512MB system, it rarely ever gets to 512MB, because the system knows the constraints and stops short of living in the swap file. Once I jump to 1Gb, somehow magically the same projects will suddenly suck up much more RAM.

It's sort of like a goldfish - it will grow as big as the bowl you stick it in.

Practically speaking, Vegas uses as much RAM as it needs to store image data. If you're working in 720x480 DV space, 512 Mb seems to be quite adequate, as long as you're not also running Photoshop or other memory intensive apps. If you're working in HD space, say 1280x720, the RAM storage requirements go up drastically. If you are working with .BMP images captured with a dslr, which are typically ~3000x2000, I can tell you from practical experience that you'll QUICKLY choke, even at 1 Gb RAM. When this happens, Vegas starts paging to virtual memory and the system will practically grind to a halt.

Ok, this brings up a question relative to my Compaq Presario... I currently have 256 MB with space available in another DIMM slot.

For the time being should I just add 512 MB to the other slot or is this going to cause problems?

IOW do I have to "match" the two memories in the two slots (get matching sticks for a total of 1GB) or can I just plug in another 512 to get a total of 768 without any compatability issues?

Is it recommended to pay the approx extra $80 for the additional 512 stick or would I not really notice it over the 768?

I won't be doing any super crazy editing, just basic home movie type stuff with sound dubbing, fades, text, maybe slow-mo, etc. I'll be using inexpensive editing software.

Thanks.

Joa

A little bit of performance depends on the chipset your computer has.

The newer 865/875 chipsets (and the ones newer than that) support dual channel memory operation. You need a pair of the same memory, and the chipset can double the memory bandwidth by using both of them at once. If you don't have the same model sticks of RAM then you don't get dual channel operation, and performance will drop somewhere around 3-20% (no idea what the exact figure is, but my guestimate is somewhere around 7%).

On older chipsets I don't think mixing memory leads to such a big performance drop. (My guess is that you have one of these, but I can't tell without knowing what your computer or your computer's motherboard is.)

In any case it's no big deal to have mixed memory in there. Even if it does lead to lower performance, several percent is barely noticeable and no big deal. If performance does become an issue, you could just spend $80 for another stick. You might want to start off with a brand that's easy to get, although with online retailers like newegg.com that may not be so hard when they have good prices on a huge selection of products.

*By performance, I mean performance for rendering video. Things like games and compressing data with winRAR will have different results.

Yaa, mine is a 845GV chipset.

Joa

Oh, and it's a Intel Celeron 2.6 GHZ processor.

I googled and found a good article on what you mentioned...

http://www.kingston.com/newtech/MKF_...whitepaper.pdf

Joa

Just an update... on the advice from folks on this list I ordered a firewire card/cable/software for only $14 at Newegg and I also ordered a stick of RAM for only $70.

Holy cow, I can't believe how much it improved the performance on this Compaq running XP. The computer actually seemed fairly fast before but now it's just smoking.

I also run 3D solid modeling on this computer (limited assemblies, nothing like I do at work) and it's really sped that up as well.

Best $70 I've spent on a computer, that's for sure.

Thanks for all your helpful advice!


Joa

For anybody else reading this... when you upgrade RAM... even if it's a different brand or capacity... you should make sure the ram is the same speed... 2, 2.5, or 3... and obviously I wouldn't mix ECC with non-ECC ram.

I'm going to start another thread to debate ideal ram quantities. See you guys who are interested in that... over there.