RAM & SSD Questions

hi people

Im about to order me a new notebook, the Asus m60J. And this notebook will have a few new features i dont know so much about, but here it goes:

1. The notebook comes with 1066 mhz ram included but i have the options to build it with 1333mhz instead. I know this whole FSB deal where the speed of the ram needs to match the FSB. So i checked a fact sheet from Intel itself about the core i7 720qm and it says "RAM 1066/1333". Does this mean it supports and can utilize the 1333mhz to the full?

2. The SSD im gonna build this notebook with is a Intel X25-m. Im gonna be gaming a lot with this notebook so is this SSD stable and good? Its a G2 according to the website.
3. Do i benefit from increasing the amount of RAM from 4GB to 6 or 8 GB or is it a wate of money?
Thank You for the help

 

Yes (but there most likely won't be a perceptible performance difference between the two), yes, and it depends on whether or not you're memory limited in whatever you're doing - if you just want to game, you're better off saving your money for the best GPU you can get.

 

Just because Intel spec's the i7 like that is no guarantee that the chipset in that model supports it. Order it with the understanding that if the RAM is running at the slower speed it will be returned.

The Intel G2 160GB is the SSD right now, if you can be patient, I would wait to see what the new year brings. The thing to keep in mind, if you want to sustain maximum performance from almost any current SSD, is to keep your % used level to 50% or less. So, yes, the 160GB G2 suddenly became an 80GB.

As for the RAM question, please see my post to see if it helps you:
See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5611835#post5611835


Good luck with your new system!

 

i dont agree with you about keeping used level to %50 , i did not see any big difference when i was using %75 of it.you wrote this idea everywhere as it is a common fact, that is not good. be careful.if you have a good system, then used %90 would not be problem.

 

It probably depends on how you use your system, though. Tilleroftheearth is running programs with a _lot_ of disk access, and thus any little change in the rate of disk access affects him a lot. If all you're doing is playing games or doing other tasks that don't involve a large amount of disk access, the drops in access speed may be (relatively) unnoticeable to you.

It also may be that in your system, the bottleneck is not your SSD, but somewhere else. Thus, you wouldn't notice any degradation of your SSD's capabilities because something else slows down your system first. This might mean that tilleroftheearth's system is actually better than yours, and thus shows the bottleneck as the SSD.

As a random example, let's say a car uses twice as much gas if you drive over 50 mph. If you spend most of your time driving on local roads with a speed limit of 40-45 mph, you probably won't notice the fact that you're using up a lot more gas on the few times you get over 50 mph. If you spend most of your time driving on the highway, you'll notice pretty quick that you're using up a lot more gas.

 

Its alright - we don't have to agree. We all use our computers differently and we all expect different things from them. Even in a big enough group of 'power users' there will be the high, the low and the 'average'.

I'd be interested to read about your experience with SSD's. When I joined last August (?, I think) I asked that question many different ways and nobody could provide a suitable answer for me. I answered that question to my own satisfaction by using/working on and testing in my own system an SSD I thought would be 'more than good enough' by everyones descriptions here.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=436882


After the above experience and the ensuing exchange between various forum members here (in the thread above and also in other threads), that is where I got the 50% figure from. It is a common fact but nobody else seems to point it out.

When I was using the Torqx (in the above link) at the 50% capacity or less, I had a silly grin on my face the whole time. As I gradually filled it to the 'safe' level of around 77% (I think) the issues I encountered I would not tolerate from a $10 HD let alone an almost $400 SSD.

So, again I ask you; how do you use your notebook/SSD and what specific experiences do you have to compare it to?

 

actually tillerofthehearth does not have a real good SSD and he/she did not even use or test any intel G2. That is why i wrote those things.
And he/she just got that opinion by seeing %5 difference in other guys' benchmark results. And if the bottleneck of my machine is something else then why its benchmark result is the same as the others'.

 

Benchmarks lie.

 

benchmark lies and you say the truth.
about your thread, these people also lies, i guess, that is funny.

i dont really understand why you are standing against the SSD everywhere altough you did not test an intel G2

Get an Intel , then stand against SSD.

AND i wont answer your nonesense questions before you get an INTEL G2 and test it.

So long...

 

mesarmath,

just like your select quotes, benchmarks can be made to say anything. If I didn't write the benchmark to test for what is important to me, then they do not tell me anything useful that I need to know.

What untruth's have I presented?

My point is not to stand against SSD's, but rather judge them like I've judged all other computer upgrades I have completed over the years. If a product fails for my use would you rather I lie to myself and worse - others, that the product is good when in fact it isn't?

My questions are only nonsense for someone with no answers.

Your 'condition' of my getting an Intel G2 to test before you provide an answer is the most childish thing I've read in a long while.

To clarify for you once more - I do not have an SSD at all currently, and until I can properly test one properly (and within the return period) I won't either.

 

so heh, what is the conclusion here?
Yes it supports the 1333 mhz ram? Or no?
Yes the SSD is stable but gets slower the more space used? or no?

lol im confused. But thanks for the response though ^^

 

ssds can get slower when filled. for the intel, it's commonly stated to, at best, not fill beyond 80%.

not 50%. tilller got that only, because i stated i don't have problems but never fill beyond 50% anyways.

 

Sorry about hijacking the original point. As Commander Wolf mentioned way back at the beginning, yes, the i7 can support both 1066 and 1333 MHz RAM, although in general use, you'll never notice the difference except in benchmarks.

Yes, the SSD is stable, and as for how much slower it gets as the space is used, well, as you can see, there's some argument over that. There was a small issue with an Intel issued firmware update a little while back (that was supposed to add TRIM) that messed up a few drives, but any shipped drive shouldn't have that problem.

And since you didn't repeat your last question about the RAM, I assume you're clear about that?

 

Nah i dont mind people arguing in my thread Judicator. Thank you all for the help you gave me. I purchased a new notebook few seconds ago. Here it is

Asus M60j-A1 16" HD 16:9/Core i7 720QM/NV GT240M 1GB GDDR3/4GB DDR3/500GB/Blu-Ray/Win7 1 $1,549.00 $1,549.00
Availability: In Stock
Fingerprint Reader: Built-in
Optical Drive: Blu-Ray Read/DVDRW Optical Drive
Additional Battery: One 9 Cell main battery $165.00 $165.00
Hard Drive: 160GB G2 Intel X25-M Multi-Cell SSD Serial-ATA II $499.00 $499.00
WiFi: 802.11 Wireless a/b/g/n
Bluetooth: Built-in Bluetooth™ V2.0+EDR
Hard Drive Enclosure: No External Hard Drive
Mouse: Optical Mouse Included
Carrying Case: Included
AC Adapter and Battery: Included
Additional AC Adapter: No Additional AC Adapter
Car Adapter: None
Windows Recovery Disk and Drivers CD: Included
30 days Zero Bright Dot Guaranteed: Yes through Asus
Packaging: Shipping with Double Box
Warranty: Asus 2 Year Limited Global Warranty
Asus Support & Service: 24/7 Toll-Free, Both Way Next Day Air Shipping
24/7 Support hotline: 1-888-678-3688 (except holidays)
Accidental Damage Warranty (ADW): http://adw.asus.com/content/adp/default.aspx
Webcam: Built-in 2.0 MP Webcam
Screen: 16 inch WXGA 1366x768 16:9 Glossy
Dead Pixel Warranty:: Standard Manufacturer Dead Pixel Warranty
GPU: nVidia GeForce GT 240M 1GB GDDR3 VRAM
Thermal Compound: Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound on both CPU/GPU $30.00 $30.00
CPU: i7-720QM, 1.60~2.80GHz, 2.5 GT/s, 45nm, 6MB, 45W
RAM: 4GB PC3-1333Mhz DDR3 (2GBx2) $99.00 $99.00
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit System Recovery DVD

 

Benchmarks are usually made to test only one aspect of a system. I did assume that when you said that you didn't see any big difference that you were just going by how things felt, as opposed to running actual benchmarks from both a "fresh" drive at less than 50%, compared to a benchmark of a drive at 75%. This is where how you use your system comes into play. Let's say, for example, that your program has a disk access followed by CPU processing, and then followed by another disk access. If your disk access took 0.5 ms each way, and the CPU processing took 10 ms, then the total time for the the operation would be 11 ms. If your disk access times doubled to 1 ms each way, then the total time for the operation would become 12 ms. You'll notice that for this particular task, since it depends much more on CPU than on disk access, the CPU time is the bottleneck here, and you would barely notice the doubled disk access times. If what you mostly do are games and other CPU/GPU bound activities, you may never notice that your SSD performance has dropped unless you did a comparative benchmark.

The other thing is, if most of what you're doing with your SSD is reading information from it, and not writing, you'll also miss a lot of the slowdown. Most of the slowdown with SSDs getting "full" (rather, as pages get used up) comes with writing to them, as once pages get used, as the drive has to start copying/deleting/rewriting full pages, even if your files don't occupy the whole space, due to garbage buildup. Now that we're actually getting TRIM enabled, that should go away, mind, but previously, it would seriously cut into write speed, even for Intel's X-25M. See here ( http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=2) for an example of how bad it can get (admittedly on a completely full drive) without TRIM. Now, there are ways around this even without TRIM (such as Tony TRIM and wiper), but as your drive gets closer to full, you'll have to do it more often to maintain performance.