Breathing Life back into Socket A

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Breathing Life back into Socket A by Article Admin

Published: 10/27/2005

Chances are, if you are still rocking a Socket A system, you would have been tempted by the ever lowering price of a Athlon 64. However, at the same time, the fact that you haven?t already sprung on a new system means that there is a factor that is stopping you; this is most likely to be that wonderful object known as cash. But the question you should ask yourself is, will you really see much of a difference between your high end socket-A system and a low end 939 or 754 setup? In the real world or for you gamer types ?RL?, the answer is “no”. Those big, colorful graphs from 3d Mark 2005 might say otherwise, but which ordinary human being, that doesn?t own a license for the popular fraps program, will actually notice the ten FPS or so difference during an intense gaming session.

Don?t get me wrong, benchmarks are an excellent tool, for determining and evaluating a systems potential, however, they also have the effect of activating ?techno lust? which if left unabated leads to credit problems. I?m guilty of going to my favorite E-tailor and filling up my basket with all the goodies needed to start a new system on numerous occasions. But in reality sometimes it?s just not practical, but what is a lot more practical is small incremental upgrades, and tips to tide you over till you finances hit that magical ?black? spot.

Socket A

That?s a Big RAM

One of the basic principles of modern computing is the usage of memory. Your computer uses its RAM (or memory) to store information for quick access. Solid state RAM is used for this instead of Hard Drive storage because if doesn?t suffer from the latency problems of it?s mechanical brother. Anything that is running on a computer at anytime is stored in memory, therefore the more programs, and the bigger they are, the more RAM is need. One way to speed up your computer is to load more things into RAM, which speeds up how quickly programs and services can be accessed by the user.

Adding more RAM to your system, results in a noticeable performance increase. The magical mark is 1 Gigabyte, at this point the Windows ?Page file? moves completely to RAM greatly increasing overall desktop performance, and leaving an even 600MB available for any application you want to throw at your system. So what does this mean? Well you can open more photos at the same time in Photoshop, open more windows, scale up some the graphic detail settings in some of your games, plus loads more.

But you don?t have to stop at 1 Gigabyte, anyone who plays Battlefield 2 will tell you it pays a whole lot better with 2 Gigabytes, and if you can afford it, and actually have a need for it, go for it. Socket A is a 32 bit platform, and therefore depending on your motherboard, maxes out at 4GB of memory, Unless you have Dual Processor Athlon MP system or really enjoy Video editing or some other memory hogging application, I wouldn?t recommend going above 2GB, just due to the Sheer price of 1GB DDR ram sticks.

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