While CPUs and VGA cards certainly help in improving performance, the amount of RAM one has installed in their system can make a significant impact. Unfortunately, this is one area where system integrators cut cost and usually bundle systems with 256MB- especially notebooks. Now a clean installation of Windows XP will run reasonably well with 256MB but as you keep adding and using applications such as Office, Photoshop or for encoding, you’ll start to see a massive performance drop.

Today we take a look at the improvement in performance as you add more memory to your system. We took a Ferrari 3200 notebook that has a reasonable amount of features such as a 128MB Radeon 9700 VGA card and an Athlon64 2800+. This particular notebook is targeted towards the high-end sector and thus came with 2x256MB memory modules. We’ve benchmarked this notebook with 256MB, 512MB and 1GB RAM in our standard suite of benchmarks.

We would like to thank Kingmax for providing us with the memory modules used in this article. We used their DDR333 modules with a CAS Latency of 2.5. Lets get started.