1 slot of ram to save battery life

will using one slot of ram save battery life?
like 1.8 volts off of my total wattage? i currently have 512 + 256 in my T43..
i got the 256mb for a dollar from ebay.. just wondering now that i bought a 9 cell battery.. will i see an improvement in battery life by removing on of the ram sticks?
i know it will access hdd more.. but wat if im just web browsing?

 

Probably wont help at all, and infact could hurt you if you end up using page file more often.

 

No, false sense of economy.

The HD thrashing more will more than outweigh any power benefit one sodimm will give.

I would even recommend to go to 2GB (2x1GB modules) if you can, you'd be surprised how much more efficiently the computer will work.

Even just web browsing.

 

About the only thing a user can do to improve runtime is to decrease screen brightness. After that, a new battery if your current battery is 2+ years old or so.

Pretty much everything else including undervolting is playing with low single digit percentages of improvement on current draws that are already in the low single digit percentages.

 

Kingston's website posts actual wattage figures for there memory cards. If I remember correctly, a 1gb memory card is around 2 watts at maximum power consumption. Most of the time the memory isnt used at its full potential, so I wouldnt say it uses more than 1.5 watts per card.

It shouldnt affect battery life that much. Especially if we are talking a 256mb card.

K-TRON

 

It won't help. Even when not in full use, higher density RAM sticks don't necessarily result in more power consumption. There's a good chance with such low capacity(256MB), increasing will actually help battery life.

Unless you are viewing webpages that are all in text with at least double spaces between lines, that 256MB will be filled quick. 256MB was the recommended amount for XP back when it was released, late 2001.

Open up Task Manager and see how much memory your browser is using.

Actually, there is ONE way taking out memory sticks can help. If it runs dual channel with 2 sticks and using 1 stick would turn it into single channel.

 

IntelUser,

I'm curious, why would single channel save significantly more power vs. dual channel?

I mean also taking into consideration that the HD will be thrashing more with less RAM.

 

i agree.. lowering the cpu's voltage by 0.3v isnt gonna make much...
lowering the overall by 1.8V will though? wont it!

 

if my system runs at 12 watts.. wont 10 watts be much better??
that like 40 minutes of extra battery life!!!!!!!!!!

 

If you want, you can try it.

However, as said:

Less ram could mean more page file usage, depending on the programs being used, which could mean more hard drive usage(could be +1.5W during read+write).

 

You're confusing yourself with the working voltage the sodimm chips require with the amperage they'll use when they being fully used. Adding a second sodimm doesn't double the power consumption of the memory subsystem, unless it is being used at maximum all the time, which of course it won't be.

With a two Watt peak power rating, that means it will be pulling over 1 Amp through the sodimm module (when the system is being pushed the hardest).

Compare this with the HD that consumes considerably more power when needed to be pushed hard (especially when you're forcing Windows to run on less RAM too):

See as an example of HD power requirements:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/640gb-mobile-hdd,2451-9.html


This is easily more than 50% more than the sodimm module will require - if it needs to be pushed to it's maximum (which unless you're encoding video or audio files, it won't be).

So, like namaiki suggested, simply try it if you don't believe it. But all you're going to do is prove what has already been explained to you over and over again.

Cheers!

 

ahhhh, dram doesn't have such a thing as idle or peak power usage.

Dram memory cells are being refreshed at all times. The on-dimm refresh controller doesn't care if the cell has a 1 or a 0 or if the OS is accessing the memory location or not.

 

If your information is right, how did I only lose ~10 minutes of battery time when I went from 4GB of RAM to 8GB? In a two hour window?

According to your theory, the power usage should have doubled.

 

Different ram chips and refresh controllers (and combinations thereof) have different power drains.

Improving power usage/drain was and remains the primary design point of DDR3. This is why access speeds of DDR3 are only now starting to surpass DDR2. The first challenge was to design refresh controllers and dram chips that actually improve on previous generations power drain. Speed improvements (again, in the context of reduced power requirements) came 1-2 years after DDR3 became available.

Without knowing exactly what the power drains of your specific ram modules are at the **specific* freq and refresh timings being used, your question is only a first of many.

Without knowing that baseline data, this entire thread is pretty damned silly.

But I suspect that you know that.