I7 Ram upgrade

Hi everyone, I am currently waiting for delivery of my dell xps17 laptop, I didnt upgrade the ram from the standard 2 * 2gb as dell seem to charge about triple what the hardware can be bought for elsewhere but i was wondering if someone could answer a quick question.

specs as follows

I7 740QM 1.73 4ghz 6mb 4c
4096MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [2x2048]
3GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 445M Graphics Card
500GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive

My question is this, would there be any noticible performance difference between me upgrading to 2 * 4gb ram sticks or could i just add 2 more 2gb sticks (I presume the motherboard takes 4 sticks as the top spec version was advertised with 4* 4gb)

Also on a related note... I am seeing a lot of I7 builds on youtube running 3* 2gb or 3*4gb. Is there a reason for this i.e do i7's work better with 3 seperate sticks of ram rather than 2 or 4 or is this just a coincidence.

thanks in advance for your time.

 

What type of use will the machine get? It takes a relatively heavy user to utilize 4GB alone, let alone 6 or 8.

 

It really depends on your usage, but more RAM will never hurt.

 

It's preferable to get 2*4 GB sticks instead of two additional 2 gig sticks.
You already have 4 GB ram, it really depends on your computer usage whether you'll have an advantage of more ram or not,

 

Noticeable difference? Probably not.

Are the youtube builds for this specific notebook, or just "i7 builds"? If just "i7 builds", then they're probably the high end LGA 1366 desktop chips; those use triple-channel memory instead of dual-channel, and thus prefer to take memory in sets of 3 (unlike "regular" core i which takes them in sets of 2). The truth is, though, it's still not going to be noticeable under normal circumstances.

 

Thanks for the replies everyone.

The laptop is going to be used primarily for gaming, wow, starcraft and diablo when it releases. Other than that just surfing, skype etc.

thanks for the info on triple channel ram judicator, that makes sense from the vids i was watching now.

From what you guys are saying i think i will just wait until it arrives and see what the performance is like. I figured the graphics card might steal a big chunk of the motherboard ram but i can always upgrade at a later date.

Thanks again for the info

 

If you're still concerned, install a program that monitors how much you use, if you're hitting the 90% range, then you could start considering upgrading to more RAM.