1333.vs.1600 DDR3 on i5-3210 with 5400 rpm HDD

Hi, im from India, & will b getting an Asus K55VM next week with

Intel Core™ i5 3210M
3 MB Cache
Intel HM76 Express Chipset
8GB DDR3 1333 MHz SDRAM

Will there be any significant difference in performance if i replace the stock RAM with 8GB 1600 MHz.??

Single 4GB stick (corsair vengeance) costs about Rs.1750, ie about USD 32.
Is it worth spending?

Oh, also my hdd is of 5400 rpm.
(Should i give any info about the mobo, etc ??)
Tanx in advance..!!

 

Unless you have a particular application which you know is memory bandwidth limited (ie gaming on IGP), the faster RAM will make no difference.

You are much better off putting that money towards replacing that crappy HDD with an SSD or even a hybrid drive.

 

Leave the RAM alone for now and save up for an SSD instead (this will have a greater impact on the user experience than that RAM upgrade). If your workloads demand faster and higher capacity RAM then upgrading would be a better investment but otherwise the RAM you have right now is fine.

 

Definitely leave the RAM alone, go for SSD. Ignoring iGPU gaming, RAM speeds pretty much became irrelevant when DDR3 was released.

 

1333 or 1600 by it self doesnt mean too much. You gotta look at latency as well. There will be a preformance jump in gettin the better ram. But i dont know if that would justify cost of upgrading. Your CPU will be fater as well as the iGPU

 

Since asus locks their bios settings, there won't be any difference (if the new ram even boots up). So there's that.

 

The difference will show little to no improvement. Your better bet is to upgrade the hard drive. Even if you don't upgrade to a SSD, a 7200 RPM drive will give you a much greater boost in performance than upgraded RAM. Focus on the HDD.

 

No, it doesn't even make a huge difference on high-end machines. Save money!

 

I can tell that the above haven't yet tried the difference quality RAM makes in their systems (I used to be one of them).

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-speed-help-screenshots-appreciate-print.html


Buy the biggest capacity, lowest latency (ie quality...) RAM SoDIMM's you can afford - I found up to a 14% difference with them (WinRAR...) and just normal O/S navigation/maintenance chores.


Is it worth it? Will depend on your biases - but for these kind of real speed 'tweaks' I would have paid over $100 if I had known about it earlier (because I believed like people above that it made no difference in 'normal' use).

With a 5400RPM HDD - I would suggest getting 16GB RAM (this will alleviate the load the HDD has to endure and the 60 to ZERO braking effect each time it is accessed).


Good luck.

 

I haven't tried 1866 MHz or faster RAM, but I didn't really notice a difference between 1333 MHz vs 1600 MHz except for one program that I use that tends to eat RAM a lot and in a rather dynamic fashion, I did notice some small improvement there.

Note that I didn't pay attention to whether it was actually a tad faster or not, there was just no wow, this is indeed faster factor. YMMV, tiller seems to be rather sensitive to those kind of things, probably more than I am.

Off topic: made a typo and wow, NBR converts p r together to Google Page Ranking, argh!

 

Try running 2133MHz vs 1600MHz, and there's definitely the "wow" factor...

 

Hmm... 16gb RAM isnt an option. Max supported is 8gb.

Will enquire about 7.2k hdd. though not sure the retailer provides customising.

Finally, anyone from India here?? I looked up ssd's online, but couldnt find anythng smaller than 64gb. I was realy hoping for smthng near 16 or 24 gb, just enough to hold the OS.
Any help where i might find smaller ssd's ??
(budget is kinda an issue)

thanks for all d help, guys ...!! :-D

 

There are 32GB SSDs. But cost between 32GB and 64GB is likely negligible, and you won't get nearly close to top performance with a 64GB SSD vs a 128GB or 256GB.

 

If budget is a concern (as it is here), then forget SSD's and get 16GB RAM (why are you limited to 8GB? Is the system only sporting a single SoDIMM connector?).

Difference between 30GB SSD's vs. the 256/512GB versions are in the order of 6x and even slower for the smaller capacities... and - that is for the newer technology (don't even want to get into the old junk).

See:
Intel 525 Multi-Capacity SSD Review - mSATA SSDs Just Became Mainstream | The SSD Review

From link above:

The point where SSD's are right now, if you can't buy the 'optimum' capacity (240/256GB or some 512GB versions/models) then it is better to not buy at all.

Not only does life at the SSD lane start out much lower for the small capacities - it also degrades very quickly from there too (remember: these are 'new/out of the box' performance numbers - in a few weeks/months time; a 5400RPM HDD will perform faster in real world use).


Get yourself 16GB RAM and save for a 'real' SSD (the newly announced Crucial M500 480GB and 960GB models is what I would be saving for: ~$300 and $600 respectively).



Good luck.

 

Sometimes you have to test things out for yourself instead of abiding by the spec sheets and what people online are saying (myself included). So here's my revised plan of action:

1. Go for 16 GB DDR3/L (1.5V/1.35V) 2133 RAM.

2. Replace 5400 RPM HDD with 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache HDD or 7200 RPM Hybrid HDD (Momentus XT).

3. Save towards 512/960 GB SSD.

4. Do nothing, enjoy computer as is and use this as a baseline for more informed near-future upgrades.

Goodluck and have fun with your new notebook.

 

Agreed.

$300 is easier than $600.

 

the lap costs only around $750.

 

The problem is that with my current notebook, I simply can't. The best I could do is 1866MHz RAM, I need my 32GB and that alone is over 300$ for 32GB of 1866MHz SODIMMs.