Notebook RAM upgrade: 1x4Gb DDR3 1333 or 2x2Gb DDR3 1066?

Which will be faster?

I ask because I'm in Thailand right now and I can't find 2x2Gb 1333. Is the increase from 1066 to 1333 big enough to warrant waiting several months until I'm back in the US and can find it affordably?

The 1066 would be dual-channel, right? But the 1333 would have a faster clock?

My laptop is a core i3 350 @ 2.27Ghz, with a discrete Geforce 330m with 1Gb dedicated.


Acer 5745g: Core i3 350, NVIDIA 330m.

 

I think the max ram speed your laptop can handle is 1066mhz. S0 the 1333mhz would be down clocked to 1066mhz. That means that 2xGB 1066 mhz will be faster, because it is in dual channel mode.

Here's a thread that talk about it: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/488853-core-i5-1333mhz-ram.html

 

Well, whaddya know, you're right!

My notebook currently has 1x2Gb of 1333 installed, and most of the hardware info programs I've used (Speccy, PC-wizard) just reported the supported frequencies, but I just looked at CPU-Z, and indeed, it shows it's currently running at 533mhz. Well, that answers my question.

Thanks!

 

The differences in speed will not be noticeable to you in virtually anything you do because dual channel has no performance gains since DDR2 days.

I'd switch to 1333 if I'm upgrading from 4GB to 6 or more (and even then I'd compare if the 1066 is cheaper ... and if it is, I'd go with 1066).

As I said, performance wise, there will be no difference between 1066 or 1333 if you will have same capacity of RAM.
If you are switching to 6 or 8GB though, then you will only notice your productivity will probably increase since you'll be able to have much more programs open at once and not worry to run out of RAM.

EDIT:
Just noticed your post.
Even if you switch to 1x4GB RAM 1066, you wouldn't notice a performance difference because of what I previously stated.
You would benefit from having more RAM though (although in the case of 4GB and possibly above, make sure you are running a 64bit OS so you can use all that RAM).

 

It actually does give a performance boost, its only a little though(5% or so).

 

even in heavily multithreaded tasks, this really will not have an impact.
If it was along the lines of 20% and more ... then yes.

 

For the record, I went with the 2x2Gb 1066 (from 1x2Gb 1333).

My Windows 7 experience score for RAM went from 5.5 to 5.9.

I was able to increase GTA IV internal benchmark from 28fps at medium settings to 29fps on high settings.

And Sandra showed a bandwidth increase from somewhere around 6.5 Gb/s to 8.9Gb/s.

 

I was referring to the performance gained in actual applications such as 3dsMax, Photoshop, games, etc... , not the RAM itself.

The 'benefits' to switching from 1066 to 1333 RAM will be minimal performance wise in actual programs (one can gain more by overclocking the gpu or the cpu if you really want to see some kind of a performance gain).

 

Yeah, you're probably right there.

I don't know how much of my performance increase was due to going from 2Gb to 4Gb total, and how much of that was from going from single channel to dual channel. It's undoubtedly a combination of the increased total and the increased bandwidth.

 

do the 2x2 option. Its cheaper and u won't see much difference in betweem both anyways so i'd get the cheaper one.