Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: lenard27 on October 01, 2007, 06:19:26 pm
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I have a Sony Vaio VGN-N250E laptop. It has 1-gig of memory and I want to upgrade it to 2-gigs. The memory came in two 512-megabyte sticks. It has two open expansion slots for RAM. My question is can I just stick in a 1-gig stick or do I have to buy 2 512-meg sticks?
I tried to ask customer service but they just told me to look at the manual, which conveniently doesn't contain the answer ANYWHERE (seriously, I read the whole thing). I found a 1-gig stick at Best Buy for $43 (sale price). And two 512-Meg sticks would be at least $30 more. Any one know the answer?
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Hrrmmm....its been a while since I read up on this stuff...DDR2 doesn't need to be inserted in pairs (I think that applies to SO-DIMMs on the laptops) but sometimes it works better if they are such as for running in dual channel mode for instance.
Someone want to back me up or contradict me on that?
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Do you know what the approximate difference in performance would be in 1 Gig of Dual Channel RAM vs. 2 Gigs of Single Channel RAM?
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Try NCIX.com or Tigerdirect.com, they may have better prices.
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Do you know what the approximate difference in performance would be in 1 Gig of Dual Channel RAM vs. 2 Gigs of Single Channel RAM?
Well it's about as it reads AFAIK. Dual channel double the ability to input data from RAM to CPU - what your CPU can do with it, is a different story. So, dual channel does improve performance in memory- and processor-intensive stuff - in terms of memory bandwidth, performance doubles, but in reality, the performance difference versus single and dual channel would depend of the type of the application. And, of course, if the processor can't keep up with the increased bandwidth, the processor will become the bottleneck of the system.
Increased memory with reduced bandwidth would only result in improved performance in very memory-intensive programs - mainly image and video editing, when the need for paging data to HD is reduced (which slows things up much more than using single channel mode), but the actual operations would be somewhat slower according to my understanding, before the memory use grows beyond what the RAM can hold.
That said, if I would not be forced to use Vista, I would take the dual-channel 1GB, for now, in stead of single channel 2GB memory. In most cases anyway.
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As Herra says...depends allot on the application. Most laptops and the functions they are being used for are fine with 1GB of memory. 2GB is still mid to high desktop range typically.
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As Herra says...depends allot on the application. Most laptops and the functions they are being used for are fine with 1GB of memory. 2GB is still mid to high desktop range typically.
Yeah, except I have a laptop with Vista Premium and integrated graphics. So some of my 1-Gig system memory is being used for the graphics (up to 224 megabytes, it changes depending on what it needs) so sometimes I only have about 800 megabytes of RAM, and Vista Premium is recommended at least 1-Gig. So I figure if I have 2-Gigs, I'll always have at least 1.8 Gigs of RAM and I can set my integrated graphics to run at 224 megabytes all the time. (I wanted to get a graphics card, but this laptop is for college and I was on a pretty tight budget and unfortunately, Microsoft Office took my graphics card money from me.)
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Do you know what the approximate difference in performance would be in 1 Gig of Dual Channel RAM vs. 2 Gigs of Single Channel RAM?
What processor does this laptop have? Dual channel hardly does anything on AMD processors or PMs (the difference is like 3%) and has a more significant effect on Core 2s and P4s (10-20% depending on the program).
You probably need to get the two 512MB sticks in any case. The last processor that supported three sticks was the Athlon XP on an nforce2, which is over five years old now. On the desktop side, anything more recent than that won't boot at all on three sticks, and I'm guessing laptop chipsets are similar. You can have one, two or four, but not three.
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I have a 1.73 Ghz Intel Pentium Core Duo Centrino Processor. And I figured that 3 sticks wouldn't work so I went ahead and ordered two 1-Gig sticks of memory. I just plan on swapping out the 512-Megabyte sticks.
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i was gunna say just do that.
My dads dell laptop has that same processor. Hes got a gig and XP Home. Runs fine i guess. Its had better days if you ask me.