...cause they always have that used car salesman vibe to them...like they're trying to fit the article to their preconceived conclusion.

But with that said, the article does illustrate that to run the top notch games at full bore you need at least a gig of ram. And to run *most* games adequately and do virually all other tasks quickly 512 is fine. 1 gig is recommened for the average aggressive user---basically what every casual computer fan would tell you.

I would have liked to see them test up to 4 GB--which is the XP limit for ram--maybe even start at 256 MB, go 512, 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB. Hit the same tests they did in the first few pages, then do a real multitasking exercise.

Sidenote: I completely threw out their "multi-tasking" section, because honestly who multi-tasks with Quake 4 running? I don't care how speedy your rig is, you're going to shut down everything else for that game. They already knew Quake 4 taxes the ram hard, so it would point out that you need gargantuan amounts of ram to run it (with or without anything else). I don't see how that's an objective test.

They should have run more commonly multi-tasked programs like have a web browser, excel, messenger, a bittorrent client, and a mp3 or video file playing--then run a program or two like a photoshop rendering, mp3 compression, or zip file compression. I think that would give the user a more realistic look into multi-tasking ram performance rather than Quake 4--which we already established is better with more ram.