Rate my Rig (again)

I said it opnce and now I'll say it again: For the average home user - even if they are using skinning programs - 8 GB of RAM is overkill.

Not bad at all. Mine is:

AMD Athlon Phenom II 940 o/c to 3.6

8 GB DDR-1066 at 5-5-5-15

3 Seagate SATA2 160 (8MB cache) striped

2 Samsung SATA2 500 (32MB cache) striped

2 Samsung 22x DVD-RW

Diamond ATI 4890 XOC 1GB crossfireX with a Sapphire 4850x2 512MB per core

Seventeam 850 watt PSU (rated at 830 watts continuous output)

Gigabyte MA790X-UD4 mobo

Enermax Uber Chakra Full tower case with 3 120MM fans and one 240MM fan

Acer 22" LCD

Kona, I disagree.

It really depends on what you do with your PC. And of course it requires you have a 64-bit O/S. I have enouhg RAM that Windows doesn't even need to page out any kernel drivers at all. That makes the O/S much faster. Lots of Photoshopping with other apps open at the same time that RAM will really help. Hi-end gaming will also use a good chunk of the RAM. I write code and do a lot of testting and will sometimes have three or four virtual machines running at the same time. I often use all that RAM. And most importantly the more RAM you have, assuming you are using a 64-bit O/S the more apps you run the fast er everything will be because of the huge reduction in swap file useage.

For gaminng having 50% of the channels populated with the highest amount of ram possible with the lowest latencies will garner the best results.  For AMD / DDR 2 this is typically 2 gig sticks in 2 channels (for dual channel) for a total of 4 gigs.  Populating the other channels will increase latency.  For the i7 procs that run tri-channel the sweet spot right now is 2 gig stix in 3 channels for 6 gigs total.

Now with that being said, this is for gaming.  For ram intensive applications where windows keeps hitting the page file then there will be benefits for the quantity of ram over increased latency.  These intensive applications include video editing, maybe some hi res photo editing and defintely virtual machines. This was confirmed with the guys at maximum PC as well as extreme tech. 

So Hawkeye is definitely correct as is Kona.  I would say that people doing virtualization, coding, testing, hi res video and photo editing are not your average home users

j

Well all I do is internet, email and old games. My 2 GB is holding up just fine. And I use XP. 8 GB would be overkill for what I do.

Get the computer to do what you want to do. I wanted light gaming (galciv2) and didn't want to spend a lot. Total cost of this rig: $350 Shipped.