Intel Turbo Cache Memory 1GB

While I was configuring an m15x on AW's site, I saw this as an option. I just want to ask those who have purchased it with their system, if it is worth upgrading this part?

 

this is suppose to give you faster boot times and for the people who did purchase it, they did get faster boot times so it might be worth it.

 

I read that if you already have 4GB RAM, then the turbo cache memory would give minimal or even no improvement. And the increase in boot times are not that big, i read a review about but can't seem to find it...

 

i ordered it and i didnt notice any difference but that could be due to running 4gb as Svarto stated above.

 

reviews are mixed. some say it helps with boot time and battery life, others say it doesn't help at all. each to his own. however, i'm inclined to think that if you have enough RAM, it doesn't help much (anymore).

 

even if you cant afford 4 gb of ram you can just get a flash drive and use readyboost and after that you probably wont even notice a difference.

 

not so sure... DDRII certainly is much faster than USB.

 

I have four gigs and turbo memory. It helps with boot time and battery life (I believe in mobile mark tests I read up to a half hour more?) in benchmarks it seems to raise my scores by a few hundred points. I believe extremetech had an article on it. for 50 bucks its not to bad but memory is a better choice first.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3009

Here is a review off the turbo cache memory, it depends a lot of what you will use your computer for. It increases battery life but not by 30 minutes, and it depends on what you are doing, for it to work the most effective you have to do the same thing over and over and over again. This is due to the turbo memory "saving" frequently used data on the 1gb stick and then when the computer accesses the information again it uses the turbo cache instead of the harddrive.

EDIT: You will see on the review that it increases the battery life with 20 minutes when surfing the web, but if read properly they are acually repeating a 4.5 minute long surf until the battery runs out. But it is nice that it increases battery life with ~10 min when watching movies!

 

meh. 10 minutes more or less, you could just as well turn off bluetooth and wifi to get the same results.

oh, btw, whereabouts in switzerland do you live, Svarto?

 

There are two things to consider about the turbo cache memory:

1) It is a waste if you are getting 4GB, since the m15x AW vista is 32 bits, so it would be a good choice for a 2GB config.

2) If you play around the m17x, you will see if you choose 2 HDD in raid 0 mode the option to install Turbo cache memory goes blank. Why, i don't know.

 

cuz the turbo memory module goes into one of the HDD slots...