A ram question

Hey all just a tech question for those in the know.

I have run gwsx2 quite successfully on my comp and have since heard of another program that allows you to run as many copies as you like on 1 comp but i have found running 4 is very laggy and 5 near impossible.

I have heard of others running 5-7 copies with no issue at all.

now atm on my rig i am runnning 2x 1 gig sticks of ddr2 800 ram making a total of 2 gigs if i was to add another 2 i gig sticks as my mobo has 4 slots for ram or would i get more benefit from putting 2x2 gig sticks in or would it make no difference to what i stated above with the multiple copies of gws. I mean as funny as i would find it running a full ha team on 1 comp i wouldnt be attempting it just makes power lvling a bit faster

any help greatly appreciated and thanks in advance for taking the time to read this.

4gb should be kind of standard, so i would recommend it regardless.
gpu, cpu, ram would be the main benefactors. what are your specs?

well, GW can only use 1 core, but a fast single core can run 2 times GW, my quad core can run 8 without extreme frame drops.
GW uses about 512MB or 1GB of ram, so 4 until 8 are ok for a loot of GW copies.
VGA card needs to rock
very fast card is needed to get over 4 copies good and playable

xp doesnt recognize more then 3gb

32 bit xp doesnt. 64bit xp does

XP 32bit will recognize 3.2-3.5 Gb in most cases

Your CPU and GPU are both important when running multiple copies of GW, although 4gb of RAM can't hurt, it depends on your processor and video card as well... any one of those 3 could be a bottleneck if they are significantly weaker/older etc...

despite that...i would still consider 4gb pretty standard for today.
many retailers sell ram in either 2gb or 4gb configurations.

besides, op didn't state his os.

sorry for not posting specs

amd dual core 5200
single graphics card nvidea 8600gt
2 gig ram
asus mobo

running windows xp (scared of vista)

Go for 4GB and just swallow the loss of ~.5GB.

so am i right in thinking that 4gb should be used regardless and apart from that should the rest of the rig be able to run 4-5 copies? I mean it can run it fine its just slow loading maps etc.

I use Matty's Guild Wars loader and it runs 2 copies with about 5-10% fps loss in intensive situations (or Spamadan)... my bottleneck is my 8600GTS card.... my system is similar to yours although my CPU is 3.1ghz (6000+) and I have 4 GB on my XP system.... my friend runs 4-5 copies of GW and he notices zero FPS loss until he hits the fifth copy... but he has a 9800GTX... big difference there. :P

If you have 4 DIMM slots in the motherboard, you might as well just do 4x1gb. I at least prefer that over 2x2 personally.

But yeah, 8600GT's also suck, so that might limit FPS some. I own a couple of them and hate them.

As long as you have plenty of RAM though you shouldn't lag too much, I run x2 games with 2 gigs of RAM just fine, and I'm sure I could do 3 with no problem either, but I wouldn't try more than that heh.