Inspiron 1520 or 1420 Memory Upgrade Question

Hi,

I ordered my Inspiron 1420 with 1gb of ram. Does anyone know whether Dell sticks in 2x512MB or 1x1GB RAM on the laptop?

I don't really have any choice to choose 2x512MB or 1x1GB RAM when I ordered this.

Anyway, I hope that it will come with 1x1GB ram so that I can add another 2GB ram on the other slot to make it 3GB total.

BTW anyone sees issues with mix and matching this? should I go with 2x2GB ram instead and load Vista 64bit?

Any input appreciated.

 

I believe they ship as 2x512mb by default. I would recommend replacing one of the 512 sticks with a 2gb stick, there shouldn't be any issues. 4GB and 64-bit is probably not worth it right now, but by getting a 2gb stick you leave your options open for further upgrades.

 

its 2x512mb, unless stated otherwise

 

As previously posted, it will be 2x512MB to take advantage of dual channel support on the board... Remeber that Dual channel requires both sticks to be the same capcity! So if you want the best performance from your computer and you mix it in a 2GB + 1GB stick fashion for 3GB total you'll get less performance compared to 2x1GB or 2x2GB.

 

Thats too bad

Guess I will go with 2x1GB for now... at least for a while until memory prices come down.

 

No, 2GB + 1GB will provide better performance than 2*1GB, and 2GB + 512MB will provide equal or better performance to 2*1GB. Dual channel is overrated, at best, especiallly in a Santa Rosa mobo.

 

I will conduct some DC and non-Dual Channel benchmarks when my 1520 actually arrives... But it depends on his usage patterns to say if 3GB will provide him better performance over Dual Channel in Vista... If Dual Channel is a 5% performance increase and he doesn't use more than 2GB of his 3GB of RAM then it will be better to still go Dual Channel IMHO...

Vista caches everything into RAM and uses it to boost the performance of the machine (which is why 1GB is now the min.), but on my desktop with 2GB of RAM running Vista Ultimate I notice Vista doesn't use 100% of that RAM for caching purposes (and Vista's caching is scaled back dynamically based on program demands).

 

The Santa Rosa chipset will still run half of that 2GB stick and the 1GB stick in dual channel, so there really is no performance loss. Also, if more RAM is available Vista will automatically use more RAM for caching, and more RAM will be available for your graphics card to share (which is quite helpful to the 8m series GPUs).