New RAM but No boost?! Help plz

[treavorbell]

Ok, Another good ole brain squeezer for you guys. As some of you may know I have recently upgraded my system. Here is the specs.

---GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 AM3 AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

---ASUS ENGTX460 DirectCU TOP/2DI/1GD5 GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16

---AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor

---G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL7D-4GBRM.

I have set the timing on my Bios 7 8 7 24 2n also the voltage 1.65v, and When I play the PC game Star Craft II the game starts to get soo jumpy and laggy that I can hardly play at all. This happens mainly whenever there starts to be a LOT going on in the game. (several units all in one spot and fightin ect.... ) I notice when this is happening in my task manager is says the games demand is something crazy like 1.6G memory usage. Does this mean that I could possiably need more memory to keep up with the load of the game? Also, when I look at my stats from Right clicking on "My Computer" is says I only have 3.25Gh of RAM and sometimes only says I have 800Mz of processor... Why is this?

I know this is alot to ready but Its killing me that I have a new set up that doesnt seem to be up to par when it should be.

[treavorbell]

I check my idel processes from my task manager and its almost 2giggs combined with the load of the game makes 3.3 giggs I believe I might need more ram, would anyone agree? And if this is so would I just be able to buy 2 more sticks of 2giggs ram and it do the trick or do i need to buy 2 4 gigg sticks and replace the 2 I have in there?

[The Wise Monkey]

I assume that you are using Windows 7/Vista/XP 32-bit? That would explain not being able to use the full 4GB of RAM.

From a bit of Googling, it seems that this is the expected behaviour when you have all max settings turned on. While this is excessive, there isn't much you can do about it aside from turning down the graphics settings a bit.

Alternatively, make sure as much as possible is closed down in the background while the game is running. It does seem very strange that all of the background stuff is using 2GB of RAM - what is using so much?

[treavorbell]

I had other things running to monitor temps, plus my nortan anti virus, other than that I didnt have much else running but the calculator I used to add everything up. So would I have to get a better version of windows inorder to utilize more RAM? (I have windows XP 32-bit by the way)

[RickyTick]

Norton can be a resource hog, but with 3+ GB of ram, it should still be snappy. You may need to run msconfig to determine everything that is running. But BEWARE! Making the wrong changes in msconfig could really mess things up.
Create a Restore Point in Help and Support.
Click Start>Run>type msconfig
Write down everything that's running, and then do google searches on each process to see if it's safe to disable. Be careful. :)

[treavorbell]

thanks for the tips bro. That is actually a really good idea. Currently as I type I am getting everything reinstalled on the other 300GB of my 750GB hard drive I am trying out windows 7 to see if it has an impact. This way I can compare. Would there be another anti virus that is free / cheap / good that I can use that is not so demanding? Also would upgrading to primary SSD help?

[RickyTick]

Try Microsoft Security Essentials.
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

[treavorbell]

all that being said I found what the prob was, it was the game settings. had it trying to reduce mouse lag and it said it would greatly impact fps, which it did. I feel dumb but humbled lol. atleast i have windows 7 now and I even went as far as to get the 64 bit

[treavorbell]

Also fyi if you have same type of ram as I do and AMD system you will need to change the timing and voltage in bios.

[RickyTick]

Glad you got it worked out.

[john123]

If you want free antivirus, you can use AVG anti virus. http://free.avg.com/us-en/download-avg-anti-virus-free