1 Gig of Turbo Memory

I will be buying a new sager laptop soon. It will most likely get the 8700m gt gpu and t8300 or t9300 cpu. I will have 4 gigs of ram, and running a 64-bit system. Is the 1 gig of turbo memory worth getting? I dont know too much about it, and I have heard it doesnt really do much at all. Can someone with experience on this topic help clear the air? Thanks.

 

I have one, which I can sell to you, I took it out of my Lenovo T61.

It helps speed up the boot process, if you have readyboost enabled. If you do not have readyboost enabled on the turbo memory card, than it will do nothing for you.
PM me if you are interested.

K-TRON

 

Don't buy! K-Tron seems nice but do not buy his problem!

 

just curious, do you need a laptop with that much power??

 

Actually the 1gb turbo memory module is not a problem. It only helps speed up boot times with slower harddrives. I replaced the 80gb 4200rpm drive in my lenovo with a 160gb perpendicular recording 5400rpm drive, and it works fine. With a high density 5400rpm or any 7200rpm drive, the harddrive will be faster than the turbo memory, making the turbo memory pointless to have.

K-TRON

 

See my sig and the comment on the 1gb ITM. With a laptop of that nature, turbo memory is essentially useless. In fact as was said earlier in this thread it created a LOT of problems for me, BSODs, etc rather than speeding me up. Just installing the turbo memory drivers and applications in a system like mine and the one you said you intended on getting will just slow it down rather than help it. It's meant for budget notebooks - slow ones with not enough RAM or slow hard drives. No offense K-tron...didn't mean to stymie the sale of your module - but why did you remove it from your machine anyways? I'm guessing because of no performance gain.

 

I ugraded the harddrive. The turbo memory actually will speed up boot times if you have a 4200rpm drive. I upgraded to a high density 5400rpm drive, which is faster than the turbo memory. Since it is faster than the turbo memory, the turbo memory gives no advantage. This is why I removed it. I had no need for it, since my new harddrive is pretty fast.

K-TRON

 

It's still good to reduce drive access and conserve battery as well as return from sleep, but for people essentially using their laptops as desktop replacements and not worrying about battery life of frequently caching Office documents on the road there's less benefit. Both readyboost and readydrive are for the more mobile minded.

Turbo Memory 2 /Robson-2 in Montevina will probably return it's usefulness as it won't be limited by the currently slow intel NAND flash and should have throughput faster than the drives they are attached to.

I would just like if they make the 4GB modules available to the old Robson-1 users since the connection can handle the speed, just hope they don't make them firmware incompatible just to tempt people to upgrade.

 

Definitely agreed. I'd be definitely looking to upgrade my Santa Rosa to the new Robson module if it would work on this chipset - there is absolutely no reason it wouldn't.

However for this iteration of ITM, I think it says a lot that HP and Sony don't support it - and on top of that Dell carried it but then dropped it from their lines. I think that says a lot.

Oh also there were statements around that ITM wasn't fully functional until Vista SP1 and that we'd realize the true performance benefits with SP1 Vista - well...I've been using the SP1 (the build available from MSDN which I think is RTM). Anyways...I don't see any benefit at all or that it has done anything. My sore disappointment with ITM continues - I really just may take it out of my laptop next time I open up the keyboard.

 

With this new information, I think I want to disable the turbo memory as I do have two gigs of ram and a 7.2k hdd. Should I just disable via the Intel Turbo Memory Console, then through Vista's settings, then the device manager? Or is there some special way through bios or physically pulling it? Thank you for your help.

 

I'd consider just pulling it out physically. I haven't done it yet but will do it when I get around to it.

 

I hear that the Turbo Memory has caused a lot of problems in the Thinkpads, but I'm not sure if they're doing that in other brands. My inclination is to stay away from it because I really don't think it serves that much of a purpose. The possible headaches you'd get from it outweigh its advantages at this point.

 

Update: I have done a clean install of SP1 x64 and I will report back if the rumors about Turbo memory being truly supported in SP1 is true or not. I wouldn't hold my breath though, somehow I still think it will end up doing nothing for machines like ours that are higher end already.

 

After a couple of days I'm finding that Intel Turbo Memory with SP1 is at least a lot more stable than it was before and that speeds are possibly faster (feels faster to me, but maybe just because it's more stable). Further test results will be posted later.