Cache?

[steve81]

What effect does the Cache have on games?

I was told to increase the Cache to equal the amount of RAM I have, is this a good idea?

[Paul Komski]

Which cache are you referring to?

[steve81]

Sorry I think I was mistaken. What I was meaning is the virtual memory.

I was told that setting your virtual memory equal to your RAM would yield a performance gain?.

[Paul Komski]

Having the VM signigicantly larger than RAM isnt a performance-related issue. It's to allow for the whole of RAM to be dumped to a file to allow debugging of what was in RAM in certain system or program crashes.

For the best performance one needs enough RAM to start with so that the VM can be kept to an absolute minimum. You just need to monitor how much your VM is accessed if you want to customise its settings. Otherwise, if it is being used to a significant extent, just let windows manage it but place the page file on a dedicated partition - preferably at the very beginning of a second or different hard drive running on a a dedicated controller: so not as master/slave if IDE drives.

[steve81]

I have just upgraded to 3 GIG of RAM, so you suggest that I should minimize the virtual memory?

How much should I allocate?