Re: Slightly OT: Laptop memory upgrade

"Jaimie Vandenbergh" <jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1gnsk4hium75cege3uqa9v7dh8afna3p74@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This would be great, except the latency is poor; they're running at CL5 as
opposed to CL4 of the original RAM.

Yes, but they're running at 321MHz instead of 266MHz, which is 18%
faster - which nicely compensates for 20% more ticks latency. When the
clock speeds up they tick faster.

Yes, I realise this is why it's only a tiny bit slower than it was before.

Does the laptop have BIOS options to set the timings by hand, rather
than SPD? If so, set the new chips manually to the same as the old
chips. They'll certainly be able to handle it.

Unfortunately not - like most laptops, the BIOS is pretty limited and only has the real basics like boot options, passwords, setting the date etc.

Alternatively, run some RAM benchmarks and see if the new chips are
actually faster (or at least the same speed) in practical use. That's
what really matters. Your computer will be quicker now whatever, with
the extra memory headroom stopping your machine needing to halt tens
of thousands of clocks to drag more memory content off the swap file.

That's why I ran 3DMark, as my only concern was any hit on the graphics performance. The benefit of having 2Gb RAM outweighs the performance hit in every aspect apart from the crappy integrated graphics! Annoyingly I didn't run anything else like SiSoft Sandra's memory benchmarks, so I'd have to put the old chips back in and see.

What I was really wondering is whether it's worth forking out £30 for some Kingston HyperX low latency 4-4-4-12 modules. Having discovered the undocumented PC2-5100 320MHz situation, I've now caught the upgrade bug again and am thinking I could speed the graphics up a notch with some low latency RAM.

Andrew

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