Should I replace all or buy only 2 strips of RAM ?

[Elsie]

I have this in my pc now: KINGSTON DDR2 HyperX PC6400 2GB

Should I buy 2 of these or should I replace it with the other pieces?

Has no plans for 64 bit OS or overclocking. I have this motherboard: MSI K9N SLI and this CPU:AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ 3.2GHz

[Marthaz]

Buy 2 to you, little reason to replace anything when you already have pieces with pretty good speed who is also the highest speed the motherboard can in overclock state.

You get to know not exploited all 4GB fully, but what you get will be not any better than what you have now, especially if you like having many programs running simultaneously and/or running applications that use a portion of RAM.

More pieces are often associated with more burden for the north bridge on the motherboard, but it is usually good about not to overclock. In the worst case is usually a notch higher voltage on the north bridge, fix the rest.

[Elsie]

Yep aware that I get only 3.5 GB, but it costs so little ram that is not point to only buy one piece.

Yes, struggling with the ram. Then do it, buy two more.

[Alexisus]

Do not take for granted that you get 3.5 GB, then you may be disappointed. When I bought two extra GB for my pc I was limited to 2813MB of 4048MB.

[Elsie]

If I remember correctly so it is max 3,2-3,5 GB ram with 32 bit OS. How to free up any in the last 400-700MB of RAM?

[Marthaz]

The only way to "liberate" the RAM is to install 64-bit OS.

Do you have an old video card with 64-128MB of memory so you will probably be pretty close to 4GB of RAM available. Do you prefer a video card with a single GPU and 2GB video memory as you can hope that you can utilize 2GB of 32-bit OS.

32-bit OS is usually 4GB minus video card memory. So please feel free round of down because there are several components that addressed before the RAM.

[Terrextre]

You can free up some extra RAM when you connect the devices you do not use the BIOS, such as IDE controllers, LAN controllers, Firewire controllers, etc., these also use addresses which also applied to the RAM.

But it is worth noting that no programs have more than 2GB RAM MAX Windows 32 bit, then you need to hack it but one of the reasons is driver compatibility that makes it 2GB maximum per program.