2gb 800mHz or 4gb 667mhz?

I'm interested in the Sager 9260,i'm not a gamer, but into heavy 3D-modelling and rendering, and the renderperformance looked great in the review.
(for as much as I know from laptops)

But I can choose between 2gb RAM at 800mHZ or 4gb RAM at 667mHZ, the price difference isn't that big, so whats the best to choose? Is the fsb-speed the most important, or the quantity?

Does a lower fsb-speed of the RAM influences the speed of the CPU, with a higher fsb(9260 has a 1066mHZ fsb)
And with the price of RAM dropping, is 4gb already a good choice?

Thanks!

 

I would say that quantity is definitely most important. You are going to nice way more performance gains from 4gb's vs 2gb's even if the clock speeds are higher, one because the memory is doubled and second the latency is higher for higher clock speeds.

 

And at the moment (I don't know if it will change in the future) the notebook Santa Rosa processors only support 677MHz RAM. 800MHz RAM will be downclocked to 677MHz. So the 4Gb is the better choice.

 

are you going to be using a 32 bit or a 64 bit OS? keep in mind that a 32 bit OS will not recognize all of the 4 gb of ram.

 

Check out Pro-Star man. You can get 800mhz 2gb sodimms from them that are compatible with the 9260...i.e. the Pro-star 9191.

You can have 4gb of PC2-6400 (800Mhz) ram. They outfit their 9260(9191) with it. Check it out down the list of accessories the 2gb modules are the last ones here.

Hope that helps if you want the best of both!

 

No laptop chipsets 'officially' support DDR2-800, and the chips will just downclock to 667 anyway.

That being said, there really is no performance difference right now.

 

He's getting a 9260....it has a Inte®l P965 + ICH8-R, and according to this it does support PC2-6400 RAM i.e. 800Mhz.

 

The chipset in your link is a desktop chipset not a notebook chipset.

 

Santa Rosa doesn't even support 800 MHz DDR2. Go for the 4 Gb.

 

The 9260 is based on the desktop chipset P965. Take a look at the 9260 specs on Sager's site. Even uses desktop C2D, Conroe CPUs.

http://www.sagernotebook.com/pages/notebooks/product_w.cfm?ProductType=9260

Thats gotta be one nice desktop replacement.

@Yakke
I'd try to get 4GB & 800MHz speed if you can.

 

It's a desktop chipset, but still Conroe's architecture does not scale terribly well with increased memory speeds so I would much rather the 4GB DDR2-667.

 

While I agree with that, there are some exceptions.

Memory speed does help in a small degree in regards to pure number crunching. Did a test on my desktop quad-core system. At CPU speed of 3GHz, had the ram run at 832MHz (Dual channel) with a timing of 4-4-4-12. Ran F@H. Then while still on the same project and all things being equal, increased the ram up to 1000MHz (Dual channel) with the same timing of 4-4-4-12. There was a difference of roughly 6% decrease in time of performance calculation from 832MHz to 1000MHz.

But yeah, for most people there won't really be a difference cause its too small to really notice. As they don't use all their system resources 24/7. I have my quad-core running F@H 24/7 so that difference adds up and is pretty significant in the long run.

 

Yes it is. Thank you for noticing that. That is the chipset IN the 9260. I.e. the chipset in the op's computer.

 

Ok, thanks for al the info, you guys really know a lot,
at least now I can make a decision!

 

well, is there a big difference from 2gb jumping to 4gb?