How to upgrade your M1530 to 6GB of RAM

Yes that's right! I have upgraded my M1530 to 6GB of RAM. For quite a while I've been saying the M1530 (Santa Rosa Chipset) can support more than 4GB of RAM. With the recent substantial price drop for 4GB sodimm I decided to test this.

Here how it's done...


1. You need to get a 4GB sodimm. The one below works fine.






2. Install the 4GB sodimm in slot B as shown.




3. Boot into your BIOS and confirm you see over 6000MB.




4. Install your favorite 64bit OS or boot into it if already installed.



I did try 2 4GB sodimm in the M1530. For whatever reason slot A will not recognize the 4GB module. This might be correctable by a BIOS upgrade.

So there you go, the maximum RAM supported by the M1530 is 6GB with BIOS A09.

Edit: I've started a request to allow the M1530 BIOS to support 4GB in both slots on IdeaStrom.
Here's the link http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/10092149/8GB_Capacity_on_M1530__Make_it_so


An extra 2GB in 64bit is nice to have! Enjoy.

 

Very nice! Santa Rosa does support up to 8GB but as you can see, the BIOS is holding that back. It would be nice of Dell to open that option up for those who could use the extra RAM.

 

That's neat! How much of a performance gain would I see with 4GB -> 6GB in apps and games?

 

I would get it but 4 gigs are more than enough.

 

None, unless you are running virtual machines.
4 -> 6 is not a performance increase, just more RAM.

 

Not sure what the performance gain would be but with superfetch the more the better... I have a HD camera and converting from AVCHD to other formats takes a lot of resources so the extra 2GB will help in my case... Actually going from 4GB 32bit to 6GB 64bit you gain 2.5GB. Even better.

 

As for now, once you have 4 gigs and not requiring massive screen rendering, the way to increase performance would be a higher-end processor (possibly quad cores, which is overkill too), a better GPU and a better HD (SSD or something faster than your current one).

Performance will be top of the line, but after upgrading from there I think the human brain cant process the difference between a few milliseconds.

 

Ok, thanks for clearing that up.

I want an SSD drive, but they are just way too expensive for me.

 

I'm just wondering, will this work on an m1330?

 

No idea, someone else will have to try that one. Unless I can convince a friend of mine to let me crack her brand spanking new M1330 open... I get the feeling she will not cooperate...

 

Ok: WoOT....Kudo's and one h*ll of a job you did there! !!!:yes:

Thanks for supplying the pics, and the *how to*

Now, what's next on the agenda????

Cin

 

For a TL;DR ...

1. Put RAM in slot B
2. Upgrade to 64bit OS/Boot into 64bit OS
3. Enjoy!!

haha. Nice one.

 

Hilarious... A TL;DR that made it 3 lines of instructions instead of 4... What's your attention span? 15 seconds or something?

 

With 6gb of RAM, you might wanna disable Superfetch.

Superfetch will try fill up that 6gb of RAM with programs that you do and dont need.

Your HD will go nuts trying to fill that space up everytime

 

Are you sure about that? That not my understanding of superfetch.

 

Did you Microsoft performance score go up? can you post up a screen shot of it? b4/post! if it improves performance i might really think about doing the same!

 

Does all M1530 have santa rosa

 

Probably not, that RAM test measures the speed of the RAM, not the capacity, and it is limited by the slowest module in the computer.

Yes.

 

wow wish i can try wid my M1330 but dont have 4 GB RAM and it is very expensive here.

 

Great job Rhodan!
Repped!

 

Also, how much was the RAM?

 

Rhodan, I was kidding so don't get your panties into a bunch. Again, in my post I said "nice one".

If you didn't catch it - Good job, I was actually wondering about this because earlier when I was looking at Crucial.com, I noticed that they said the max RAM per slot was 2GB. It's kinda cool to see that's wrong, though (although I don't think that I'll put a 4gb RAM stick in there).

What BIOS are you running? The only thing that would be preventing a 4gb stick in slot A would be BIOS (as the chipset allows 8gb). If you're running A09, you're screwed until they get a new BIOS out that maybe supports it.

Edit:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231202

Edit 2:

Honestly, the MS Experience score is bull$$$$. If you want to really see "performance", it would be in PCMark or 3DMark tests. Not to mention, increasing the RAM in a system doesn't really increase speed (if you have over 2GB) because you're looking at bandwidth for speed - not amount. However, if you're loading up things into the RAM, you will notice a speed increase WHEN you've got a ton of programs running.

 

I know you were... I should have added to my reply.

Thanks or answering thse questions while I was sleeping.

 

Wat's next?

Get Dell to change the BIOS to support 8GB total...

http://www.ideastorm.com/article/sho...30__Make_it_so

 

I am still running only 2GB on my desktop with Ultimate and my computer seems plenty quick to me and I do HD video editing also. It is Mpeg 2 though which uses a lot less resources than AVCHD. I also use Photoshop a lot and never had any complaints either. I was already thinking the 4GB I ordered my XPS with was going to be more than enough.

 

All depends on what you do... Some will be happy with 2 GB while others won't. I'm happy with 6GB for now, I would really like to be able to get 8GB working since I have a spare 4GB sodimm...

 

Good job. I guess I'll be upgrading soon. I am wondering if M1330 will take more than 4GB with the current BIOS.

 

I'm don't know if it will but a friend of mine is coming over with her M1330 in the next week or so. I might be able to try a 4GB sodimm in it... Will post the results if she let's me try..

 

Does the 6GB run in dual channel mode?
Think you can check with Cpu-Z (no install needed).

 

It works in Flex-Mode.
Read intel chipset information Page 66 section 5.2.1.1:

Intel Flex Memory Technology (Dual Channel Interleaved Mode with Unequal Memory Population)
http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/datasheet/316273.pdf

With a 6GB configuration:
2GB + 2GB run in Dual Channel
2GB run in Single Channel

This is called Flex-Mode or "L-shaped" Memory, depending on the source of information you have. I'm pretty sure CPU-Z is too stupid and doesn't know about those transfer modes.

Looks like this:

 

Thanks 7oby as always your information is most helpful and straight to the point

 

7oby, very nice explanation!

Come people, we need votes for Dell to change the BIOS so it accepts 4GB in both slots.

Please go to http://www.ideastorm.com/article/sho...30__Make_it_so and promote!

 

nice kob,but i still think that this is an overkill for 1530-maybe for sager 9262 it is good,but not for this one...

 

lol... My last notebook was a M7700 Aurora and it was massive and the 9262 is just about the same... The power supply alone is a brick...

IMO 8GB in the 1530 is not an overkill. All depends on what you do with the system. I'm sure there's peeps with sager 9262 class systems doing little more than WP because it's a cool system to have and it's impressive yet others are using their M1530 for hosting VMs and other such demanding tasks.

 

no,i mean that you need other parts of your laptop to be powerful enough to "enjoy" more ram

 

And what exactly would that be? RAM is not like a graphics card where it can be vastly superior to your CPU. RAM is just allowing you to have more programs opened at once.

 

Exactly! More ram = more open applications with less swapping to the page file. Which translate into improved performance.

 

For Gaming more than 4GB don't give you much. Games currently use up to 2GB of memory:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3044&p=2

I don't think the very few 64-Bit game ports make much of a difference.

Being able to disable the pagefile however is a very nice feature and gives quite a performance boost. This is especially true, if you run virtual machines (e.g. for some crappy legacy software that runs in XP, but not in Vista; or online banking; or testing software in different environments). Then you might even consider disabling the pagefile of the OS that runs in the VM.

If you give me the choise between two eqal machines. One has 4GB in dual channel mode and the other has 6GB and let's make it worse: The 6GB machine would for whatever reason only support single channel mode. If your only interest is gaming, then you'd be better of with the 4GB machine (and maybe a 32-Bit OS). But I'd personally be better of with the 6GB machine - even if memory would be slower (single channel, CL5). It really depends what you do with the computer ...

With a certain amount of main memory (don't know whether it's 6GB or 8GB) Windows Vista disables its hibernate feature. Writing this amount of memory to the harddisc takes longer than a cold boot. Thus it is disabled and I don't know whether it can be enabled again.

 

I'd be curious to know if the hibernate feature is still working now that you have 6GB of memory.

 

Microsoft says hibernate ist automatically disabled at >4GB main memory:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888575/

But there is a workaround: Either "powercfg /h on" or "powercfg –h on" from an administrator command prompt, which is supposed to enable hibernate again.

One more interesting article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vista-workshop,1775-9.html

My favorite picture in this article is this one:


It shows a little bit that Vista 64-Bit eats more memory as the 32-Bit Version and also that Vista eats more memory in a 8GB config.

 

Nice SN!

lol

 

excellent post. I linked this post to xps forum, and went to promote on ideastorm.

 

Thanks hotrent1, hopefully more peeps will promote the idea...

 

Noooo, is there any other places were I could get two modules like this one?. Sice newegg doesnt ship to other countries .

 

On my system with Vista Ultimate 64 Hibernate works without the need to make any changes...

 

I might have to try this on my laptops! I've been doing loads with virtual machines.

 

NCIX i work there i would recommend u blank out the barcode

 

Does Dell support Vista x64 for the m1530?

 

Any updates on M1330 compatibility?

Just convince her and tell her she'll get famous for doing this. Vista 32-Bit will already display the total memory although there are some pitfalls: Vista 32-bit will detect the memory modules and display the total size. But this doesn't tell whether Vista 64-Bit could be using it.

If the BIOS has bugs regarding memory remapping, it won't run at all or not reliable. If've seen some BIOS updates regarding enhanced 4GB support and 64-Bit compatibility on Dell's site lately, but doing a quick search I didn't find those notebooks/desktop BIOS versions.

Therefore I think it's a good idea to launch Ubuntu 64-Bit Live DVD. And dump the output of "cat /proc/mtrr" and "free" here.

 

Thanks for the info. Hibernate is a key feature for me with a laptop.