Putting It To The Test
But what's the ideal as far as memory is concerned? In order to find that out, I decided to take a typical Media Center system and ramp it up by degrees from 512MB of memory (which is actually a more reasonable memory baseline than 64MB) to 2GB, which is half the maximum memory most consumer motherboards support, and the absolute maximum you'll find for some.
For those purposes, I acquired four Ballistix 240-pin DIMM, DDR2 PC2-6400 memory modules (P/N # BL6464AA804) from Crucial Technology. Because this is high-performance module (complete with heat sink), it can be expensive -- upward of $100 per module. You can find equivalents, like Crucial's standard PC2-4200 modules (P/N # CT6464AA53E), for about $40 less per module.
I used two pieces of software to test how the added memory impacted my computer: COSBI OpenSourceMark (OSMark) and Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus.
OSMark is a synthetic benchmark -- that means there are no actual commercial applications in the software. Instead, OSMark was designed to test all of the subsystems (CPU, memory, graphics, hard drives) and then derive a single performance number by combining and weighting those individual results. VideoStudio is a real application I used to separate 43 minutes of video clips from a one-hour captured television video and then stitch them back together to create a complete show, except without the commercials. It's the computer equivalent of heavy lifting.
Incidentally, the only other change I'll be making in the system, besides adding more memory, is moving in and out of dual-channel memory architecture. Not up to speed on dual-channel? No problem.
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