March 1999 SDRAM Comparison

The Naturally Speaking Voice Recognition benchmark shows an incredible improvement when going from 64MB of RAM to 128MB, however after the initial boost in performance, the drop off is significant, illustrating that the realistic needs for even a professional user running Windows 98 remain at the 128MB point.

Encoding using the Microsoft Netshow benchmark provided an almost indiscernible difference among the different memory configurations, even 64MB is enough in this case.

Adobe Photoshop is an extreme memory hog, especially when you're dealing with manipulations of 20MB+ images. The sweet spot for a Windows 98 system here is 192MB, the drop in render time from 64MB to 128MB is considerable, however the drop from 128MB to 192MB is much more noticeable. All in all, the sweet spot for a Windows 98 system seems to be between 64MB and 128MB, with the general trend of requirements taking the ideal Windows 98 PC in the direction of a 128MB minimum setup.