Want to upgrade P-6831FX Memory (Vista Home Premium 32bit)

I am on crucials website looking to upgrade my ram (if you have a better source let me know)
I was either thinking about getting:
1) 4gb kit (2x2gb) PC2-6400
2) 2GB & 1GB PC2-6400

I am aware about the 32bit using 3gb of ram and the 64bit using all 4gb of ram. But I was wondering would I see a better performance if i bought the 4gb kit or the 2+1 pieces. I will not upgrade to the 64bit version at all.

 

your not going to get any better performance out of that memory than the stuff you already have in your system. 6400 down clocks to 667mHz in the 68XX series of notebooks.

4gb will let you run in true Dual channel mode (but thats not much better than the flex memory the chipset already offers) but you'll only get just over 3gb of it.

Just get the cheapest PC5300 4gb kit you can and call it a day. Your basically wasting your money with higher clocked RAM

 

There is a long debate about operating in dual channel or not. My experience with 3GB of ram is that I cannot notice a difference. I would prefer to have 4GB so I can have 3.5GB ish in Ram (32bit OS) and can disable my page file, that would be my only reason. The difference ain't much, get the 4GB and disable your page file, try out 64 bit even.

 

Wait why would it downclock? This kid i know got a x7900 and all of his scores were 5.8, 5.9, and the drives were 5.4. How was he able to upgrade his ram and socore a higher performance, if the ram downclocks

 

Wouldn't the ram limit be a motherboard limit and not a processor? Not sure...

 

oki, but how did his score go up? unless he went out to get a new laptop motherboard

 

Vista has an unreliable scoring system. My score changes every time I run that scoring utility. I have no disabled it. Use real world use and benchmarks to see the actual advantages.

 

It would down clock because our chipset is limited to 667mHz RAM

This is my WEI with an X9000, low latency RAM, and RAID 7200 RPM WD black hard drives.


If I ran it again i could probably get different scores than this. And the truth is the WEI is a retarded benchmark. Usually i sit at 6.3 in all of my scores simply because i care so little about it that i just hacked it to show what i want it to show


Now I'm not saying you cant go and get the nice shiny new RAM, but i am telling you its a waste of money. I didn't listen to people that said other wise and i ended up basically wasting 109 dollars to be able to transmit 1bit of data faster than everyone else... so with out doing anything but 1 bit files (not something very common) i got no real gains and basically have a 109 dollar lighter wallet for it.

So I'm just trying to save you a bit of money and head ache on something that's not going to give you ANY performance improvement. Unless you want to go to the 64bit platform and get 4gb of RAM then i wouldn't really waste my time with the upgrade

 

Thats the right thing to do. And thats what I did

There is no noticeable difference between the original 3GB and 4GB ram.
Then why did I do it?
With 4GB you get 3GB available whereas 3GB gives you only 2GB something.

 

???
What?

With a 2x1 set up you should still have been getting 3072mb of RAM.

If not you might have had a bad stick.

 

Yes, with a 2+1GB setup you get 3GB installed RAM.
But there is always a portion that is reserved for I/O mapping. And Windows takes its share too. The amount of RAM available and installed is shown in system info.