in most cases no . Unless youre doing alot of crazy multitasking, but of course in that case you would also be CPU bound.

in the case of XP in particular XP can run very happily with 512MB of RAM. and the kind of games/applications that need 1GB of RAM will also cause that 450Mhz PII to run away in fear

You only need as much memory as a program is designed to use. Any less and disk swapping makes things slower than optimal, but any more than that does absolutely nothing. CPU cycles are a wholly separate resource.

Even older Software can use a Big Memory.

1Gb on a PII 450 will still give you a improvement.
If you use older Software like Photoshop, Premiere 6 you will benefit from it.
or using Multiple Software Instances at same time.
Switching beetween Game and Desktop will Alt + Tab will faster if lots of memory used..
No need to load data from swapspace.

You even want XP on a Dual PII 450. 2000 is not as good...

Don't believe '90s marketing (when the prices were really gouged) - it doesn't. The performance gains are very exaggerated. RAM is nice for productivity apps and general disk swapping reducage, but higher ram quantity != makes a CPU perform faster.

What you want is faster RAM, now that would do something. That limit varies by motherboard and BIOS though... you can generally get away with PC133 in a Slot1 rig though you had to flash the BIOS of earlier '97 Slot 1's to support them.

Indeed.

More often than not, it doesn't. Really, the only things that would benefit from having a large amount of RAM are stuff like video editing programs. Even then, a lot of those applications would also benefit from having a faster CPU as well as faster RAM speed, which depends on mobo and BIOS.

More RAM only helps if the PC is memory starved/paging a lot. After that, you get greatly diminished returns. You'll be able to hold more data in the disk cache but thats it.

Also, I'd never put XP on a Pentium II retro-machine. Maybe back in the day it might have made sense for business PCs, as the enhanced stability could be useful, but even then Windows NT or even 2000 would make more sense. Any games and hardware that would make sense pairing with a P2 are probably more at home in Windows 98/NT4 anyway.

Funny you should mention this, last night I just installed WinXP on a dual P2-450 with 1.5GB RAM. But no, I can say from experience it's still slow no matter how much RAM I put in it. 😀 It's execution performance is still that of a P2-450. As others have said, it just won't hit any speed bumps if the RAM gets heavily occupied.
There might occasionally be load spikes where more RAM comes into effect, but for the most part an excessive amount of RAM won't make a noticeable difference.

Historically it's been common for many people to not have enough RAM for Windows to operate smoothly with their applications. It's most common with non-technical users with store bought PCs, which often skimp on RAM as a way of making them less expensive. For them, more RAM is an effective performance upgrade.
I remember getting a 2nd hand Dell P4 (in beautiful condition) which was using over 300MB at boot with the user's basic applications, yet only had 256MB installed from Dell. The guy probably didn't understand why it was so painfully slow and thus decided to get rid of it. I looked up the service tag and the whole configuration was factory original. The original buyer had ordered the machine with a Prescott Hyperthreaded CPU upgrade, but still the default 256MB RAM.

XP SP3 is much faster on my PII as 2000 with all Updates.
And has better Driver Support, if you going to use it for Games and want to use both CPUs,
i would definitly recommend XP.
With Dualcore Patch you will also benefit from better Thread Sheduling on XP. (Windows 2003 Kernel)

I've had XP SP3 on a Dual Tualatin S 1.4GHz system before. It's an old 1U Supermicro server with 2GB PC133 ECC memory. It runs at a plenty usable rate, but disk speed is definitely a factor to take into consideration--it really needed an up-to-date drive, something in the 7200RPM range rather than the 5400 or slower disk it has.

matze79 wrote:

XP SP3 is much faster on my PII as 2000 with all Updates. And has better Driver Support, if you going to use it for Games and w […]
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XP SP3 is much faster on my PII as 2000 with all Updates.
And has better Driver Support, if you going to use it for Games and want to use both CPUs,
i would definitly recommend XP.
With Dualcore Patch you will also benefit from better Thread Sheduling on XP. (Windows 2003 Kernel)

If you are going to game on a P2 Windows 98 is the way to go. It is just faster, even without using one of the CPUs, ans has better compatibility with games from its time period, and runs MS-DOS games much better. Driver support is a non-issue, as anything one would fit in a P2 motherboard (3.3V AGP cards, older PCI sound cards, etc.) will have great Windows 98 driver support.
A dual P2 is a weirder beast, though. A NT-only dual P2 isn't very useful, so I'd just dual boot Windows 98 (for gaming) and the NT OS of choice. I'd stick to Windows NT 4 but I guess XP would run fast enough, though not as fast. Games from that era are single-threaded anyway, so Windows 98's lack of dual-CPU support is a non-issue for that, unless you plan on multitasking while gaming.

Recently installed 2k on my Duel P3 600 Only 2 games didn't work in my list. Return fire and Need for Speed 3,4,5 (or all of them when 1 didn't work I didn't bother with the rest.
I'll agree NT4 isn't much use for gaming, XP is a bit heavy for a P2 But I would argue 2K is actually a better gaming OS then 98 for the majority of 9x games, even on a single CPU system. its so much more stable and my 9x PCs aren't that bad really.

The PC duel boots to 98 for the above games, and also so I can drop back to DOS if I need, so best of all worlds. The 2nd CPU doesn't really add much benefit if I'm honest apart from been damn sexy

More RAM can actually slow your system down.

I remember upgrading my BX PII-450 rig from 256Mb to 768MB of RAM. No, it did not make any performance difference anywhere at all, it's hard to use up even 256MB on a PII anyway, and more RAM does nothing. However, memtest at boot takes thrice more time 😁

RacoonRider wrote:

More RAM can actually slow your system down.

I remember upgrading my BX PII-450 rig from 256Mb to 768MB of RAM. No, it did not make any performance difference anywhere at all, it's hard to use up even 256MB on a PII anyway, and more RAM does nothing. However, memtest at boot takes thrice more time 😁

That is true if you use Win9x. An NT based OS won't have this problem.

But a Dual P-Pro or Dual Pentium II with NT is actually faster with win applications (not necessary games) and (light) internet usage? Obviously compared to the late 90s alternatives.

Actually, if you're running a pentium, they can only cache 64mb of RAM, so having more than that actually makes for a performance hit. Even if you're running NT. P6 architecture doesn't have this problem though.

Dual Pentium II's would make a great Unix/Linux box, I've got dual 1GHz Coppermines with 2GB ECC RAM and it runs Debian 8 very well.