Your Opinion: Which is better? RAM or Processor Speed?

jlp09550 · - Joined: 05 Jun 2005 Posts: 123 Location: Louisiana, USA

Just wondering:

If someone offered you a choice over more RAM, or an upgraded processor speed, what would you choose over the other and why?
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TRUSTAbyss · - Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Posts: 3752 Location: USA, GA

I would choose RAM becuase I already have a good enough Processor (Intel Core Duo)

hc2995 · - Joined: 07 Aug 2006 Posts: 644 Location: Maryland, USA

Processor, i have the max amount of ram for this PC (2 GB) but i could only afford the basic processor for this machine (Intel Celeron D)
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AbyssUnderground · - Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 3855

Id choose processor since mine all suck except my laptop! RAM is also cheaper so therefore you could buy more RAM than a new CPU.
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olly86 · - Joined: 25 Apr 2003 Posts: 993 Location: Wiltshire, UK

More RAM as my current motherboard has the best CPU it can handle, but can take upto 2GB of RAM, that's an extra GB I can fit.
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Tom Chapman · - Joined: 09 Jul 2005 Posts: 933 Location: Australia

RAM is cheaper than a CPU.

Rather simple...

hc2995 · - Joined: 07 Aug 2006 Posts: 644 Location: Maryland, USA

Well, if you take a look at his question hes asking, which would you choose ram or cpu? hes not asking for your PC just in general. Basicly niether are best, they have the ups and downs. CPU's will make you faster BUT if you have no ram, then you arent going to go very fast. Ram on the other hand is cheap, but if your CPU sucks ass, then you arent getting much from your PC. Basicly the HDD, RAM, and CPU determine speed. If you have a good CPU, and a good amount of ram then look at your HDD, is it full? is it over 75% full? The bigger your HDD the faster things run (ONLESS, you have a sucky OS like vista (its really really REALLY slow and hard to use, XP is better id say)) if you want a fast PC, you will want your HDD to be less than 50% full, you want your proccessor to be MINIMUM of 3 GHz ((the higher the better, ALSO dual core is WAY better than single core) and ram should be decent (about half of the motherboards max)

Hope this helps
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Where have i been? School got heck-tick, had to move half way around the state, then back... and then i had to change jobs, so iv been away for a while :P

jlp09550 · - Joined: 05 Jun 2005 Posts: 123 Location: Louisiana, USA

Well, I have a dual core on my laptop, 2 gigs of RAM, and a 50 gig hard drive. The speed is EXCELLENT. It can run programs my other desktop computers cannot. I'm assuming it's due to the dual core. Basically, I was told dual cores separate application processes to each RAM chip to speed it up. It's very good in that case.

On the other hand, my main answer is that the CPU basically determines the speed, since it is the main part of a computer. It processes information and then gathers it from the hard drive, then stores it on the RAM chips, if needed.

I do agree with the HDD, RAM, and CPU variables, since it goes through the same process for every application you launch.

:)
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madman1337 · - Joined: 29 Jul 2006 Posts: 182 Location: Houston, TX

it would depend on the type of application that I would need to have run. Not to mention, a computer is only as fast as its slowest part.

An example of that is if you have a computer with a nice dual-core processor running at about 2.6GHz and you have 2GB DDR2 RAM but you use a regular PCI video card, and you try to play games, then you will still get horrible framerates because it would all bottleneck at the PCI bus and would take a while to get to the GPU.

So, it all depends on what the application is and what the rest of the hardware is.

Not to mention, processors aren't all about speed. This is proven by Pentium 4's that can have very high clock speeds but may not end up performing as well as many other slower clock speed processors due to the slower ones having a better architecture.

If I need anything to be faster in my computer I just overclock it...I have liquid cooling for most of my computers at my house so I typically can overclock it insanely...like this FX5200, currently running at 360MHz (250 stock) and a Memory clock of 439MHz, and the temp of the core is 19°C.
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hc2995 · - Joined: 07 Aug 2006 Posts: 644 Location: Maryland, USA

yep, thats another factor, if you are playing games and are using the OGPU (On board Graphics Processing Unit) then your games will be slow (as well as your PC because your CPU is handling ALL the graphics)
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Where have i been? School got heck-tick, had to move half way around the state, then back... and then i had to change jobs, so iv been away for a while :P