Is 8 gigabytes worth the upgrade

Who's upgraded from 4gb to 8gb?

Right now I have the C2D M11X on order through Dell with 4gb. Is it really worth the upgrade to get 8gb?

What performance increases will I see besides better multitasking speeds? Will gaming be smoother?

 

That will be a no on both speed and gaming. Having 8gb won't net you any performance increases simply because that's not what it's there for. Going from 4gb to 8gb only works if you are doing RAM intensive tasks such rendering etc. Unless you plan on opening up 100 programs at once, 4gb is plenty.

What you want is tighter RAM timings. A 4gb kit with 9-9-9-24 RAM will perform slower than a 4gb kit with 6-6-6-24 timings. You will not see much difference in everyday tasks, only in numbers from a benchmark that honestly means nothing.

 

I think you should go with 4GB if you are still unsure by now.

First off, I am a new owner of the m11x. I had the chance of using the m11x with 2GB and 8GB of RAM installed. I find that 4GB is all you really need. If I had to do it again, I rather save $$$ and put the money I save into a SSD fund for the M11x. I find the 5400rpm hard drive too slow for my taste.






Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.6GHz OC| 8GB | 160GB 5400RPM | GT335M | Win 7-64 | 11.6" 1366x768 |

 

The m11x will automatically set the fsb:dram ratio to bring down speeds to 800mhz and it will automatically set timings at 6/6/6/15. You wont get any difference between a 1333mhz 9/9/9 and 1333 7/7/7 kit for example

 

Thanks for the replies. I understood that 4gb was more than enough when I ordered it, I just wanted to be absolutely sure.

Thanks for helping me to be concrete about my memory choice.

 

Later in the future you can easily upgrade it yourself, for like 1/3 of the price if you were to buy off newegg. Give it a few weeks and see if what you do is too intensive, then go ahead and buy 8gb of ram seperately.

 

Basically there's no downside to having "too much memory" ... it's just more expensive, obviously, and it won't be something noticeable that makes you go "Wow this is faster!" or anything like that. It'll just make windows run a little smoother, with less hiccups... cause it basically has more memory to play around with.

I believe the M11x R1 overclocks to something like 1.7 ghz. You may want to try that if you want a noticeable performance boost.

 

4GB should be more than enough. I ended up installing 8GB mainly because I installed an SSD and turned the paging file off. Even then it's not absolutely necessary but, during gaming, the memory does run a little low. So basically it gives the system a little more headroom. Now RAM prices are pretty good also so for around $80 you can pick up a matched set of 2x4GB RAM.