SXPS 16 (1645) Is it worth it to upgrade RAM to 8GB

I'm just curious. I have 4GB of RAM (Running win7 64) - should I upgrade to 8GB?

Would I see noticeable increase in performance?

 

Depends on what applications you run.

Take a look at the built in Resource Monitor, see how much your applications are using.

 

About two weeks ago I upgraded my 1645 to 8 GB of RAM from the stock 4 GB I received from Dell. I purchased 2 x 4 GB G.Skill DIMMs from New Egg. The price has dropped over the last couple of months and the free shipping was a boon.

Will you notice a performance increase? That really depends on what sort of things you do with your system. A great deal of my day is spent developing in Virtual Machines; the benefit I've received is the ability to give Windows XP the full 3 GB RAM that it's capable of addressing natively without impeding my host OS (also Windows 7 64-bit). Actually now I'm able to run two simultaneous virtual machines without really noticing a depreciation in performance.

At this point though, the limiting factor is really the hard drive. I am pleased with my purchase since it's a decent boost to my productivity and I feel the upgrade was inexpensive, BUT if you're looking for a more noticeable upgrade I think the best you can do is a SSD. If they weren't so bloody expensive, I'd have already taken that route, but I don't want to be handicapped by storage space or go through the effort of replacing the optical drive with a second drive bay.. only to experience more heat.

 

Going from 4gb to 8gb was an essential for me, at any given moment I'll have 15-30 windows and tasks running (i.e. photoshop, firefox, AutoDesk)as well as many widgets and process instensive applications. It also helps that I have a 256 ssd and an i7-840qm processor though. Like was said above, it really depends on your individual uses and behaviors.

 

Hmmmm, I do run a lot of apps like Photoshop, aptana, eclipse, win XP mode Virtual machine + Zune , but I'm not sure it will help me that is why I'm asking

Thanks guys.

I know SSD would be great but not at $500-600 for 256GB.

 

If you have 8GB RAM you may totally discard swapping to hdd in windows - that will give a definite boost (with certain restrictions anyway)

 

There is tons of debate on this paticular topic. Some say it is safe to disable it with such a large amount of ram rendering it obsolete. Some say that certain protocals within the Windows system will automatically seek out the paging file regardless of how much RAM is in there and if it is not located it may cause errors. Feel free to try it however I have enough storage room and a fast enough ssd to where designating .5-1.5 to pagefile does not really matter. Personally, i'd prefer to stay on the safe side, however the choice is purely up to you.

 

I'm in a similar position and I'm just about to order 8gb for my 1645 as I'm always running out of memory which causes virtual memory to be hit which is slow.

Can anyone see a problem with this Kingston memory?

Kingston KVR1333D3S9/4G

It seems to tick all of the boxes for spec and seems cheap but I was just curious why the manufacturer doesn't list it for the 1645.

 

imo it seems just right. I cannot see a single point which may cause incompatibility. (but I'm not an expert neither )

 

Glad to hear I'm not missing anything obvious, I'll get it ordered and see how it fairs.

 

I am planning to upgrade the memory in my ordered XPS 15 to 8 GB instead of 4 and I will use Kingston RAM too. The only thing I know what needs to be considered is the new memory has the same number of megahertz, DDR3 and is SO-DIMM (204 pins) for notebooks.

 

It will also need to be non ecc memory which this seems to be.

 

What does non ECC Memory mean.

 

It stands for error correction code and it's used mostly on servers and it tends to be more expensive. Google 'memory ECC' for more info on the details if you're interested.

To my knowledge most systems nowadays inc Dell laptops insist on non ECC memory.

 

Just as a follow up to this for the record I bought and installed the Kingston memory above in my XPS 1645 and it seems to be working perfectly and is very good value compared to other memory on the market.

 

Do you think there's a difference between the memory of the SXPS 16 and the new XPS 15? I want to upgrade my XPS 15's memory and buy two Kingston modules too.

 

It'l depend on whether your xps has a dual core or quad core

 

It has an i7 840qm thus quad core. Which type of modules do I need with that kind of processor?

 

PC3-10700 DDR3-1333 204pin SO-DIMM
(also shown as PC3- 10600/10660/10666, they are all the same)

 

I want to use:

SDRAM-DDR3-1333 (PC3-10600), SO-DIMM, 204-Pin, 1.5 Volt, CAS Latency (CL) 9

Are they completely compatible?

 

Yes its the same thing, the 10600-10700 is just the rounding used on multiplying 1333(.3) by 8 (bits in a byte)=10666

 

Okay... Many thanks for your help.

 

This is the spec of the Kingston ones I linked to at the start of the thread so they should be ok for you.