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It's an EXTREMELY important point. As a coder, it's come to the point where you have to treat some kinds of memory access the same way we treat hard disk or network access - the slowest of the slow.
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One of the reasons to make sure you have more than enough RAM. Going from the CPU cache to the RAM is one thing, but if you have to access data on a mechanical drive, it slows it down even more. I wouldn't think of running PS2 without 8 gigs for that reason alone.
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How could I improve that for myself? Overclock my FSB?
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Working with FSB overclocks is probably the simplest way to boost the whole system, in tandem with dropping the CPU multiplier if you don't want to scale that too. I've only done FSB overclocking on older AMD systems (pre-Phenom), but the more recent ones shouldn't be too hard.
Intel machines, from what I understand, are less happy with this tweak because the FSB runs the PCI express bus and some other things that the AMD chips have an independent clock for.
I haven't done any RAM overclocking since it can be a long process. You have to adjust voltage, the FSB, the multiplier, and then fiddle with the individual timings. I use my gaming computer as my main system, so I'm more concerned about data corruption than cranking my RAM speed up.
As per a component switch, RAM isn't too expensive currently, so you could look for a high end set and just drop it in your machine. For example, I see an 8G 2133 9-11-10-28 set for $60, while an 8G 1600 9-9-9-24 is $40-45. So, that's an extra $20 for a 15-30% performance boost. You do have to have a motherboard that can support the higher speeds though.