Im planing to purchase an extra gig of memory for my desktop i wanted too know if.....

• There are improvements in applacations ( firefox, gimp, open office, blender )
• Will todays games (crysis, gta4, fallout 3) play games at high framerates on good settings (1240x720 resolution)

Will your motherboard support 3 gigs in dual channel mode? Probably not...really, their shouldn't be much application improvements unless your using most or all of your 2 gigs.

Games don't depend on RAM to run well, 2 gigs should be enough to support the games so your framerates will depend mostly on your 9800gt.

Increasing from 2 GB to 3 GB will result in the loss of dual channel, unless your 2 GB is on one stick. Therefore, your memory bandwidth will be significantly lower, which will counteract the benefits from the extra memory.

If your 2 GB is on one stick, then you should buy another 2 GB stick. If your 2 GB is on two 1 GB sticks, you should buy 2 more 1 GB sticks to keep dual channel.

Either way, you'll end up with a much nicer 4 GB, which is recommended for Vista.

But does his motherboard have 4 slots?

Good point SNGX. I wasn't aware that dual channel could be run unless ALL sticks were the same size. But yeah, we don't know how many slots he has.

Just for fun, let's google "dual channel interleaved" mode.

Just as an academic excercise, let's ponder why more RAM on the motherboard would effect video frame rates very much, since these are for the most part dependent on the GPU and the memory contained on the video card itself.

Your motherboard only has 2 slots so you physically can't fit them in. Only if you replace your 2x1GB with 1x2GB than you can add another 1x1GB or 1x2GB of RAM. Also see that the RAM you buy is mobo supported "Support Dual Channel DDR2 400/533/667 MHz".

http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en-us/mb/content.php?S_ID=303

Oh yeah and about the performance. Jumping from 2-3GB isn't that much change. From 2 or 3-4 Gives you a good boost.

I'm guessing that there's a 32 Bit OS in the machine. If that's so, it wouldn't even recognize the added 1GB (from 3 to 4). If it (the OS) can't recognize the extra gigabyte of memory, please take a moment to explain how this would give "a good boost" (in performance).

Thanks for all the comments yeah windows xp media center edition 32 bit is in my macine

With 2x2 gigs of RAM so cheep these days, you could probably get a pair for less than $40.

Not unless you are actually getting bottlenecked by you RAM (you actually use 90% +), you shouldn't see much of an improvement with more RAM.