RAM upgrade

newuser86

I have a sony fw5 and looking to upgrade RAM as it only came with 2gb. The problem i have is do i just buy one more 2gb stick for apporx £30 quid or upgrade the whole system to 8gb for £150. Will there be a huge difference between 4 and 8gb? i have a 256gb ssd flash drive so is pretty nippy at the moment

Hammyman

Don't waste your money. No home user needs more than 2GB. You'll notice no difference whatsoever. Most business grade laptops come with 2GB because there's simply no need for more unless you're doing serious CAD/DTP. Hell, until recently, my desktop had 2GB in it and I used it for a gaming machine. It only got 4GB in because the new motherboard needed DDR3 and there was a good bundle deal for mobo, CPU and RAM. Your SSD will probably be as fast as RAM so if it does need to use the paging file, you'd notice no difference between using that and extra RAM.

The bargain bucket retail ones come with 3GB in an effort to mask a crappy CPU.

spakkker

+1 for the above statement.

newuser86

Thanks for the above posts, just checked the RAM and its nanya nt2gt64u8hd0bn-ad . Not much info on the web for the RAM. Only problem is the ram is the lowest thing on the windows index system (i am aware it is pretty rubbish) at 5.2 so wanted an all round decent laptop for basic video editing and gaming

spakkker

You have ddr2 800mhz ram ,not bad but not the latest,ddr3. It works best in matched pairs and there are diminishing returns when adding more memory.
Video editing and gaming are going to rely far more on the cpu and gpu than on ram.

newuser86

Yea bit annoyed its not ddr3. I have a intel duo cpu 8700, with 256gb ssd and 1gb hd4650 graphics card so should be ok, will probably look at increasing RAM in future

poppy10_2

Likelihood is that you have a 32 bit operating system, which will not be able to use more than 3.5GB RAM anyway. As others have pointed out, going above 2GB will probably make little noticeable difference for most home users.
And upgrading the amount of RAM will not increase your Windows Experience Index score for RAM - that goes by how fast the RAM is, not the amount. Your laptop already has the fastest RAM it can handle (DDR 800MHz)

richyrichuk

poppy10 wrote: »

Likelihood is that you have a 32 bit operating system, which will not be able to use more than 3.5GB RAM anyway. As others have pointed out, going above 2GB will probably make little noticeable difference for most home users.
And upgrading the amount of RAM will not increase your Windows Experience Index score for RAM - that goes by how fast the RAM is, not the amount. Your laptop already has the fastest RAM it can handle (DDR 800MHz)

don't forget though, that is only a software restraint, that can be lifted. and stop the limit at 3.5. IF he has a 32bit system.

just double check ur fastest speed by checking manuf page or.

www.crucial.com/uk

paddyrg

richyrichuk wrote: »

don't forget though, that is only a software restraint, that can be lifted. and stop the limit at 3.5. IF he has a 32bit system.

just double check ur fastest speed by checking manuf page or.

www.crucial.com/uk

Of course that becomes a somewhat bigger job, needing not just with new RAM to feel the benefit, but new OS and frankly new 64-bit versions of the software to have any real value ... all for a diminishing return for almost all circumstances. It may just not be worth it or the hassle!

Hammyman

newuser86 wrote: »

Thanks for the above posts, just checked the RAM and its nanya nt2gt64u8hd0bn-ad . Not much info on the web for the RAM. Only problem is the ram is the lowest thing on the windows index system (i am aware it is pretty rubbish) at 5.2 so wanted an all round decent laptop for basic video editing and gaming

What it means is the speed of the RAM isn't the best, nothing to do with the quantity. Your system is more than capable of gaming with the RAM. Whether the graphics are up to it or not is another thing.

Hammyman

richyrichuk wrote: »

don't forget though, that is only a software restraint, that can be lifted. and stop the limit at 3.5. [/URL]

It can only be lifted by switching to 64bit. 32bit software cannot address more than 4GB. The "stop the limit at 3.5GB" doesn't do anything to address the problem and still you have the limitations of the 32bit program itself.