DDr3 (10666) vs DDR3 (8500)

Have a Samsung X460 with currently 3 gigs (2 gig chip and a 1 gig chip) of DDR3 (8500) I'm trying to figure out if the laptop will take advantage of 10666 stuff if I buy some or should I just go with another 2 gig chip of 8500 and remove the 1 gig chip.

 

NO save your money and just get another 2GB stick of PC3-8500, that extra bandwidth of PC3-10600 is not noticeable in real world applications.

BTW to access 4GB or more you need a 64bit OS, Therefore, unless you have a 64bit OS, upgrading from 3GB is not going to make much of a difference either (must be why it was configured with 3GB in the first place). You'll most probably end up with around 3.2GB of usable memory out of that 4Gigs.

 

well 3.2 gigs of ram is better then 3. Also with 2, 2 gig sticks it should put it into dual channel which should speed it up a bit.

 

Modern chipsets support something called Asynchronous dual channel, under which you can use a 2GB and a 1GB stick to achieve some sort of a partial dual channel mode. If I remember correctly performance is somewhere between standard dual channel and single channel.
Then again dual channel mode is not going to increase the performance as much as you think either. Take a look at these benchmarks. Tested last year using DDR2 RAM; and since DDR3 has a much higher bandwidth , for you the difference could be even less. In those benchmarks the difference never amounted to even 5% in any of the tests.

and for 0.2GB extra ?? hmm.... Looks to me like you have your mind set on this upgrade no matter what . So go ahead.

P.S : If you don't already have a 7200RPM HDD, then upgrading that would be a better choice.

 

Stick with the DDR3 (8500)1066Mhz memory. Its like half the price of the DDR3 1333Mhz memory.
Plus no Intel mobile cpu at the moment can even make use of 1333Mhz memory, so just stick with your 1066Mhz memory.

K-TRON

 

If i am not mistaken with the new Intel CPUs 3GB will be the norm for your so called "three" channel. So, having 2GB/1GB will be tri channel. They wont be making very many mobos that have 4 ram slots when this become main stream.
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"Three channel memory: each channel can support one or two DDR3 DIMMs. Motherboards for Core i7 have four (3+1) or six DIMM slots instead of two or four, and DIMMs should be installed in sets of three, not two. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_3

what type of CPU does your laptop currently have ?

 

There will be no increase of performance between the faster memory and the slower as the c2d platform won't take advantage of the speed increase from the memory as it's built in to the northbridge and not CPU like any AMD-platform or the new core i7 where memory is important.

So it would be plain waste of money getting the faster dimms, stupid too as your notebook won't use the higher speed either. But even if it did it won't affect performance in any noticeable way.

And 3GB vs 3.2GB isn't noticeable either. And i don't even think you're fully utilizing the memory amount you have now, 200MB more memory wouldn't do any good for you anyways. If it was 1GB more then it COULD do a difference, but nothing noticeable there either.

But as someone else said, it looks like you're going to upgrade anyways no mather what we say. So why make a thread?

 

As far as I understand you need to have identical sticks to make dual channel work. And even if you do it's not going to make a lot of difference.

Better invest your money in a fast 7200rpm drive or SSD, if you haven't already done that.

 

I made a thread asking about 10666 vs 8500 not should I buy the ram, but thanks for being concerned. But thank you I appreciate most of the comments on the thread.