Harddrive and Ram Upgrading for ASUS G1

So I've decided to upgrade my ASUS G1 (bought in 01/2007) hard drive to 320 GB and 3GB of RAM. So which hard drive and RAM should I choose ? Thank you for your help.

 

A SATA HDD. Opinions on the quality of various brands differ and are not useful in general, because the quality typically depends on the model more than on the brand. Have a look at the reviews for some models, R/W speeds, power consumption etc. and make your own decision.

Any SODIMM DDR2 RAM will do. The brand matters little except if you wish to overclock the CPU, in which case the RAM should take the higher FSB, and in that case, I will leave the overclocking gurus answer the question.

 

Thanks for your answer EBE. In your opinion, what brand is more reliable ? Corsair / Patriot / Crucial / G.Skill ? And what about the difference in the latency between the existing 1GB and the new 2GB Ram ?

 

As EBE notes, you will get the gamut of opinions re: RAM better/worse than others around here if the members all weigh in. I use 3 of the 4 on your list amongst my various machines (desktop and notebook) at home, and have had no problems with any of them. Besides the DDR2, you should also match speed frequency of the sticks (i.e. 800/667), and dual-channel performance bump is a non-issue in notebooks so ignore that.

Latency differences are unlikely to manifest themselves in anything resembling a meaningful way that you'll ever be able to tell the difference for daily usage, except between benchmark numbers. Don't worry about it.

 

Just get some good DDR2 ram, I would suggest a reputable brand over cheap generic stuff mainly because of the warrenty they provide. As above, match speeds and if replacing all the moduals in your PC get ones that are as fast as your PC supports (usually DDR2 667 or 800)

As for the HDD, take a look at a few reviews of some (seek times and transfer rates, if you run on batteries alot then look at power usage as well). I was looking at Western Digital 7200 drives earlier as they were a bit cheaper than some other drives with similar specs but any SATA that performs well should do fine, faster spin speeds will generally get you a more responcive system.

 

Yeah, sorry, forgot about the speed of the chips. Although I think the G1S chipset only works at 667 anyhow, so they will work at 667...

As to 7200 vs 5400, I'd actually recommend going for 5400 and a higher capacity. If you're lucky you will get a 5400 with higher-density platters and the performance is going to be close to the 7200.

 

RAM: G1s uses ddr2 667 Mhz, and you had 2x1Gb in your system. So you could get 800Mhz, but note that itll downclock (choose the cheapest of both, or make it futureproof choosing 800)

Dunno if you have a 32bit or 64bit operating system. If you got 32 bit, its not worth getting 2x2 gb RAM, cuz itll only use 3gb of it. No problem if you got 64bit.

HDD: I bought a seagate 7200.3 320gb for my G1s, its fast but I cant say I notice a huge difrence in speed. Temps are steady and more then low enough. What i did was buy a cheap external eSATA case for my old 160gb hitachi stock HDD, and I use it for external now. Pretty nice.
Difrence in speed between nowadays 7200rpm HDD is not big, so go for the cheapest one.

Good luck

 

Sorry for digging the topic but I have been really busy lately. My notebook is G1, not G1s. Does the maximum Ram allowance vary between these models?

 

I really don't know. The G1 is an older model, so it's possible that there are chipset and/or BIOS limitations.

You could post a link to your question here to the G1S owner's lounge: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=126365 (since it appears the older G1 models do not have an owner's lounge). Maybe some G1S owners will know, or maybe some G1 owners are subscribed to the lounge.

You might also ask Ken or one of the other resellers via PM (or wait until they see this thread), they know all the ins and outs of a lot of ASUS notebooks.

 

G1 is a mobile 945 chipset. I would imagine that he'll get 2944MB like everyone else with ASUS on PM945. Mobile 965 chipset-based units should technically be able to use memory remapping but BIOS support must be present for it to work (apparently G1S did not have this in its BIOS and there was a big stink about it, not sure if it was ever actually fixed).

The HDD should be SATA, though it's SATA 1.5Gb (should be fine with SATA 3.0Gb units since they're all properly backward compatible on the laptop side).