Hi guys,I have read so often in this forum that going from 1GB to 2GB does nothing for FS that I started to believe it. While this might well be true for the majority of users if you put a lot of pressure on you system it canmake a huge diference. Before I start elaborating I have to explain that my setup is far from normal. What I have running on my sytem is:HardwareMonitor 1: 24" widescreen at 1920x1200Monitor2: 17" Touchscreen 1024x76810 GF unitsTrackIR3Software:High res meshUTLots of military and GA trafficcomplete set of RealityXP gauges like GNS530, 4300 etc.Active SkyV6 (through WideFS)DF's Cessna CMAdd-ons like Vancouver etc.WideFSHaving said that I bought a 2GB dualchannel set from Teamgroup. First I went with standard ram and FSB settings to rule out that the difference comes from faster timings or FSB speeds. I fired up FS and wow. What a difference. The periodical stutters I sometimes had under heavy scenery and traffic load...gone. Switching views without a pause. Spot view: incredible difference. I can now circle around the aircraft in full speed. After I adjusted the memory speed to 250 MHz(the ram is rated at that speed / I adjusted the CPU multiplyer as I have air cooling) it became even better. I have the feeling that for the first time FS really loads all the autogen. I can move around with TrackIR like crazy now without a hitch.So while 2GB presumably does nothing for a simple FS installation it can work wonders if you really hog the system with loads of hard- and software running in the background.BTW the taskmanager says I have about 1.1GB of ram free. But when I had 1Gig of ram installed it said I have around 400MB free. So you really cannot trust the task manager when it comes to evaluating how much ram would actually be needed. If you have less Windows takes less. As simple as that.AlexP.S.: System specs:AMD Athlon 3800+ (now at 250x10)2024MB Teamgroup Extreem 250@3-3-2-8DFI Lanparty nF3-Ultra DATI GF6800XT (will change to XT850XT next week) Some of you might say that I had too much stuff running in the background in the first place. I have 8 services running in windows. And I neither do I have a firewall nor a virus scanner running in the background as the machine is not connected to the internet. The rig is for FS and nothing else.

If you're running that much stuff, I can believe it...1 to 2 gb would make a big difference.How do you like your DFI motherboard?

It's a nice and well laid out board. However I do not make use of many features like SATA and RAID. Basically I bought it because I had two fast video cards which are still AGP. However when I got it I was pretty po'ed. The BIOS it had installed was too old to recognize my XP3800+ and therefore it wouldn't boot. The packing said X2 compatible so it was a rather new board. Had I not found a very friendly dealer who was reasy to unpack an unused XP3000+ to flash the board I would have been stuck. I would have had to buy an old CPU in order to flash the board. That is not what I call user friendly.Alex

Yup, 2GB really does make a difference, especially in some of the newer games like BF2 or FEAR.

And 2GB will allow you to eliminate or set to the bare minimum (2MB on Win2K) the VM setting, which DOES IN FACT yield much less to zero drive-writing activity when using FS9. I confirmed this beyond the shadow of a doubt some time ago using performance monitor, despite the rash of caca someone here spewed out in an attempt to discredit the idea. You can indeed do this with less ram, but when using complex aircraft I found myself running out of memory and shutting down after a longer flight, now with 2GB ram and VM set at 2MB this has never happened. Definitely an overall smoothness enhancer. I still do have some issues with very slight hitches when .wavs come up for the first time in a flight. Presumably once they are written to memory this accounts for the fact subsequent plays of that particular .wav do not cause any sort of hitch whatsoever. This seems to imply the issue of these sorts of hitches does not have anything to do with the audio processing hardware but instead has to do with the loading of the .wav into ram, which arguably takes some more time than does playing a .wav once it is in memory. I have an audigy 2, which when running audio benchmarks seems to offload the CPU by about 5-8% of total CPU use, hence was probably worth the $$, but the hitches occur either with the onboard audio chip or audigy 2, until the .wav has played once. If anyone has a better explanation for this issue I am certainly open to hearing it. Perhaps some of the more recent audio card & drivers somehow do the task of initial loading and playing of the .wav files more efficiently. It is the only source of slight hitches with my PC now.Cheers,Noel