For Netbooks with Atom, is RAM upgrade worth it?

I know normally that the bump from 1 to 2GB RAM is worth it, for Windows XP SP3. However, this computer geek friend of mine says it would do nothing in a netbook, as the bottleneck is the Atom, not the RAM.

Now, I know that RAM is cheap - money is not the issue here. But there are other non-monetary costs that I would not like to disclose here (...it's complicated, involves an interspecies relationship with a superior existence - a girl) so let's pretend money is an issue.

Because we're pretending that money is an issue, HDD upgrade is out of the question. Yes, it's cheap, but it's still more expensive than RAM.

The heaviest tasks being performed on this 1000HE would be running Flash, playing videos on Youtube and Photoshop.

Thanks in advance =)

 

I upped mine to 2gb. It seems to be a little faster but its all very subjective. You're still going to be limited by the atom in many cases. But if you are heavy multitasking it will help. Another thing to note is when your computer needs more memory it will go to your hard drive, and the hard drive in the 1000he is slow.

In short, I would do it, based on the reason you said, its like 15 bucks now.

 

I am running 2GB (no pagefile) on my H with no problems. I would say upgrading to a more efficient hard drive is a better use of the money, then going with 2GB (no pf). My 2 cents...

 

So even in Photoshop and playing Flash games (or even scripting/coding them) there would be no objective difference?

And I know Atom cannot play HD videos on Youtube...Can this be worked around by downloading the videos first, then playing them with the appropriate light-weight video software (which enables Atom to play 720p)?

Honestly, if I could upgrade the HDD, I would. Probably to a 500GB WD Scorpio Blue since the extra capacity matters more than the faster speeds of a 7200RPM HDD. The Scorpio Blue is plenty fast enough anyway.

 

as long as you don't come to your ram limit, no difference. but if you work f.e. in photoshop and realise it gets really slow, then check your hdd lamp (and the ram usage in the taskmanager). you quickly see that you are over the limit, and thus slowing down horribly. and then, more than one gb helps very much.

getting a faster hdd (ssd at best) helps subjectively the most (and objectively, too). but of course, only more ram + better hdd == best.

but yes, the atom limits a lot, of course. if it runs at 100%, you can't get any faster.

it's always the slowest part at any given moment, that blocks your system from getting faster. happily, most of the time, the slowest part is the user, even on an atom

 

Heavy Flash seems to kill the atom. You could always overclock too. May help a bit.

 

HD youtube video is fine here without downloading it first. Also.. 720P and 1080P h.264 videos plays fine at 24P on intel atom n270.

If you're no hitting the ram limit, adding more ram is useless. Try running photoshop and do what you regularily do with photoshop and see how much ram is used. If it's below 800MB, then it'll absolutely make any difference. If it's between 800-1200MB, adding more ram might make a minimal performance improvement. If you're using over 1500MB, then you should upgrade the ram.

In a netbook 99% of the time, upgrading the ram to 2GB will make absolutely 0% difference. If you're really going over 1GB ram ussage, you should just get a laptop. Netbook isn't the right choice for you. Although, there are exceptions to everything.

Also.. the HDDs used in current netbooks are very fast compared to old laptops. The stock hdd in acer aspire one gets about 140MB/s burst read/write speed and about 60MB/s average read/write.

 

I hope that bit about superior existence was meant with pure sarcasm.

 

HDDs in current netbooks are faster than old laptops, but are still slow relative to fast modern HDDs. For example, my eee pc HDD has an access time of 22ms. Good 7200rpm drives get between 14-16ms. Put in an SSD and you are flying.

 

I would not recommend overclocking. In such a confined space a netbook has very little cooling power/airflow, and it would be easy to damage your pc.

 

Overclock in Asus eeepc or acer aspire one will not affect the heat output a lot. It's probably perfectly safe because even with heavily overclocked atom, the heat output will still be quite a bit lower than the old intel chipset.

Although the access time of the 5400RPM hdd in netbook are highier than 7200RPM ones, the throughput is about the same. Also the 5400RPM hdd like the ones in Acer Aspire one gets about 17ms average access time. It's not very far away from a "good" 7200RPM hdd.

 

I'm on 2GB of RAM with the N270, whats weird is that I could run Photoshop CS2 and Vegas 8.0 (the video preview is like low though) fine.

I get performance increase with overclocking, it gets noticeable during games like CS (frame rate at 1.6GHz is like 15 - 20 fps average, while going to 1.984GHz overclock goes to like 20 - 30 fps average.). The heat is generally the same.

 

It's not that weird at all. The netbook is capable of playing hd videos, hdv video editing, photoshop cs4, Virtual machines and almost anything you can throw at it with the exception of modern games.

 

Definitely worth the memory upgrade.

With 2gb of memory I have no problem running multiple virtual machines and doing video editing.

 

it is worth it
it will speed up multitasking
even if it does this only to a small extent,
ram costs nothing
uk
http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/68570.../+PC5300+DDR2+/+200pin+SODIMM+/+Laptop+Memory
us
http://www.rkcomputer.net/rkcnotebooks/index.php?l=product_detail&p=82

upgrade the ram first and then if you need further speed, the hard drive to something like:
uk
http://www.ilgs.co.uk/products.asp?partno=WD3200BEKT
us
http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=HD...c15984f240818dadbaf80a9444cb299907279b4f1c0ab

 

Since he's Canadian, NCIX would be the best retail/online store to buy ram from.

 

canada? then buy this...
http://www.compu2000.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=7134
and this if u need to
http://www.compu2000.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=7133

$30 cheaper in total than ncix btw

wow didnt realise stuff in canada was so cheap

 

It looks good until it gets taxed.

 

NCIX has sales every week. E.g. a couple weeks ago, they had 2x2 CORSAIR XMS2 800mhz ddr2 ram for $15. There's a bunch on sale right for for around $25 for 4gig of ram. Much better deal than buying from compu2000.
The lowest price on NCIX i've seen for laptop ram is $5/GB.

Same goes with the HDD, the exact same model was selling for $50. Now the price is like $65, still $10 cheaper than compu2000.

The price is still pretty good after 12% tax. Sometimes, it's even cheaper than if you buy it in US.

 

I found one reason for upgrading the RAM on the 1000HE, even if 1 GB RAM is not being used. Upgrading RAM to a faster 800Mhz stick gives more headroom/stability for overclocking the Atom, either by using Asus's Super Hybrid Engine software (which clocks the N280 to 1.75Ghz) or by using SetFSB.

From ( http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewpoll.php?id=65687)

"WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF RAM IN OVERCLOCKING?
Overclocking the FSB, as stated again, increases the speed of everything, including your ram. Different Ram have different speed specs that they can operate at. A computer as a whole works by coordinating billions of addition sequences in a second, If your ram cannot keep up with the rest of the computer, one missed digit would cause a complete utter System crash. There are different specs of ram in concerns to your 1000he:

The default ram in a 1000he is a DDR2 PC5400 1gb stick, the 5400 means that the chip is rated for 667mhz highest
Ram that is good for overclocking is DDR2 PC6700 ram, the 6700 means that the chip is rated for 800mhz highest
If you go to the bottom of the post, there is a link to CPUID (CPUZ), if you launch that program, you will be able to see your FSB speed in mhz, this is tied closely to your ram speed. Ram is important, If you want to get faster overclocking speeds, 6700 800mhz ram is a must.

When I say 667mhz and 800mhz highest, I mean that those speeds are the "garunteed" highest speed of the ram, assigned by the ram manufacturers. If you look at your FSB when on SuperPerformance mode in SHE, you will see that even if your ram is 667mhz rated, SHE runs it to 700mhz (this would explain why some computers crash with SHE even if they just bought it)."

 

No wonder some RAMs cause system crashes, I never knew it had so much technical detail as an issue. Thank you Xiphias for that valuable info.

 

I've been mulling over this post.

I was under the impression that 1080p was outside the domain of all current Atom+945GSE configurations.

The Seagate 5400.6 in the 1000HE is pretty slow, with an access time greater than 20 ms and anemic read/write speeds.

You're right about the RAM, but for more stable Atom over-clocking (even overclocking with pre-installed Asus software is reported to crash the eee on occasion) it might be worth the switch.

Overclocking doesn't seem to be too dangerous with the Atom - Intel advertises an operational temperature up to 85oC and even with overclocking the N280 never seems to exceed the high 60s-to-70s.

It seems that some people can play HD videos (and other things that stress Atoms) smoothly on their netbooks, whereas others cannot.

 

3-5Mbit/s h.264 hd videos play smooth as butter on my netbook as well as almost all of the bdrip downloaded from the internet.

BTW.. I have WD Scorpio Blue 160GB HDD.

 

I was going by the review posted on Notebookreview.



Other 1000HE users have reported getting the same drive as well. That's amazing that you got a Scorpio Blue.

 

Apparently, I got better access time than the 500GB scorpio blue hdd. My miniumum transfer rate is round 40MB/s and the Maximum transfer sped is about 70-75MB/s. My acces time is around 15ms.

 

I heard Atom is not good Neon is better ..

 

Something that was noted with asus netbooks is that as you change the power settings you alter your hdtune results. In powersaver on the eee you can get any HDD to 10ms, which is an artifact. Any chance that may be happening with your acer? 15ms is reasonable but I wonder if what i just mentioned might be going on.

 

I lock my multiplier to 1.6ghz and use custom power profile. The power profile doesn't seem to effect on acer aspire one's hdd access time at all and it's on par with many reviews.

 

Both neon, Nano and Atom all suck. Though, they're good enough for general uses such as watching BD-rip, photoshopping, adobe after effects, maya2009, and general word processing.

 

They're not that bad - I can certainly understand the attraction to netbooks. The Atom processor seems to be able to do anything you would reasonably want to do on a 10-inch screen, such as the things you mentioned...sans maybe Photoshop or manipulating HD videos.

I'm in accordance with Intel here - as a feature, netbooks should not focus on whether they are able to play 1080p Bluray, which is only really an option when using video-out on a netbook anyway. Battery life, weight and low-cost are more important features, as netbooks are already over-priced as they are.

It's so weird that some people can play 720p flawlessly, but others cannot (also, what about out-putting video to a higher-res screen?). Jacklou claims that his netbook can, but the only discernible difference would be his Scorpio Blue which should have minimal impact on play HD video compared to processor+GPU. Certainly he doesn't have an N280 paired with the GN40 (though he may have the Asus N10 netbook).

IMO, then the next option would be to consider a RAM upgrade to 800Mhz and pair that with the N280+945GSE, overclocked with Asus's Super Hybrid and/or SetFSB, to see if that would help.

 

I think other things that might help with 720p video is
-the media player (VLC supposed to be good)
- try this (at least for asus), super performance, and set battery settings to minimal power management--http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=65691

Not sure if it works, i don't really watch hd on mine

 

Taken from Notebookreview's review of the 1000HE.

"[Performance] Enough for surfing online, checking e-mails and basic office applications. Streaming video at 480p from Hulu.com is laggy, but still watchable; high-def 720p youtube videos are almost impossible to watch as it requires a significant amount of CPU power to render these videos. Basic flash games will still run, but are also laggy in most cases. Video playback on the hard drive is perfectly viewable."

Super Performance is one of the configurations for Asus's Super Hybrid Engine program that I was referring to earlier - at this setting, the N280 is overclocked at 1.75Ghz.

 

I think streaming hd and watching pre-downloaded hd are different in terms of resource consumption.

 

Yes. On a ASUS 1000H that I played with overclocking (setfsb) plus SHE, the CPU seemed to underclock the data bus when CPU was clocked higher than 1.6Ghz. Latency would increase to all peripherals: disk/sound/video. Very strange as measured by DPC. For that reason I have always suggested the U100 or NC10 as better choices for overclocking.

 

I don't know if it actually affects performance of the HDD or peripherals. I mean when you underclock the processor, you're not really getting 10ms access times even though it says it is.

 

Yes, I think so too. But Jacklou923 said he has no problems with watching HD Youtube videos on the first page of this thread.