p-7811fx upgrades

Folks,

I *have* seached, but nothing relevant turned up. If this info is currently in an existing thread, my apologies.

1. Max RAM: Has anyone tried using 4gb so-dimms? Did they work? (Yes, I want 8gb...)

2. Intel 5100: Has anyone tried a 5300n adapter? The 5100 works, but it is a bit flaky with ubuntu.

3. CPU: I have seen both p9600s and x9100s recommended. Which one has the best bang for the buck?

Thanks

 

1. 8GB costs about what the laptop costs new (1000 bucks for most kits right now) so I doubt there are too many who have tried, the chipset does support that much ram so chances are it would work
2. Should work fine from what I've read, though I believe the 7811 lacks a 3rd antenna like the 7805 which kinda hurts it
3. X9100 has a higher TDP (44w vs 25) and the bios currently limits you to 3ghz, so the overclocking potential goes to waste. The P9600 is cheaper, but 390mhz slower. If it was me I'd get the P9600 and not look back, or get a T9800 if you really want all the mhz you can get.

 

anyway, by the time 8gb shows any difference over 4gb of ram, it will be so much cheaper, so you might as well wait. you won't see any difference in using 8gb over 4gb because there will still be other bottlenecks, such as the GPU for gaming, or the CPU for application use. Even with an extreme processor, the processor will still be the bottleneck when you have 4gb ram.

When you have dual quad cores, and SLI'd 9800GTX's then you can start thinking about 8gb ram. (well, maybe a little before that, haha)

 

T9600 is def best bang for buck IMO...

 

I like 2 hard drives striped. nice and snappy

 

Thanks for the replies everyone, but I do disagree wrt to the difference between 4 and 8gb. I don't game, but I do use Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom. Both of those apps can easily chew up a large chunk of ram.

However, I can and will wait for the 4gb dimms to drop in price, but I was curious if anyone had tried using the big dimms.

Thanks again,

m

 

Can anyone tell how much does the P8400 affect 9800M GTS performance, and the GPU has been OC'd nicely. I mean, how much in real games? Does the T9800 or T9600 help much?

 

I'd really like to see any photoshop or adobe app use more than 4gb of ram without being cut off by the cpu/gpu first...

and I don't mean that cynically, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, it would just be interesting (and unbelievable in my opinion) to see.

 

Easy. Use both at the same time. Further, define a ramdisk for the Photoshop scratch area. My main home machine has 16gb for this very purpose...

 

I've seen a nice boost in performance with Warhammer Online and my t9600 the p8400 struggled pretty bad with 50+ players on screen (still playable just 10 or less FPS) now i barely see below 15. those couple xtra fps when it gets that low make a ton of diff. 55-65 fps not a big diff but 5-15 is a world of difference.

 

Another use for lots of RAM:

Live video capture at high frame-rates and/or high-resolution. Currently industrial application which require video capture (ie: motion capture for in-game cut scenes, CGI movies, Animation, etc) collect data faster than it can be saved to a hard-drive. At VGA resolution @ 60 frames/sec you can fill 2GB of RAM in just a few seconds (32-bit OS). With 64-bit OS's the memory cap is effectively gone.

Another solution is to stream the data to the hard-drive in real-time. There are still hardware bandwidth limitations (the actual limit of data transfer is limited by the mechanics of the hard-drive, not the interface). RAID helps here but can get very expensive (serial attached SCSI "SAS" across 4 or more 10/15k rpm drives).

Bottom line.... More RAM please!

 

well it looks like you guys are exceptions, I think we can agree MOST people don't need 8gb. but you're right I shouldn't have assumed that you wouldn't be doing such extreme stuff