Thinkpad W520 Memory Upgrade Advice

I've received my W520 with 4GBPC3-10600DDR3 1333SODMM yesterday with i7-2720QM and Win7-64bit OS. I'm planning to do some software developments with this laptop so I'm planning an upgrade.

My question is:
1) Should I add a 8GB RAM to make it 12GB or should I just use 8GB instead?
2) Will there be any significant improvement when I go up from 8G to 12G or even 16G?
3) Which RAM models have been tested and guaranteed to work with W520?

Thanks for your advice!

 

My advice would be:

1) 8 GB is plenty enough nowadays, I run 3 virtual machines at the same time without problems. You can always upgrade later, when the cost will be lower.
2) from 4 to 8 you'll see the improvement. 8 to 16 - not as noticeable. It's much better to get 8 GB and an SSD.
3) All of them should work, but don't take my word for it . I'd get the cheapest RAM from a relatively well known manufacturer (Samsung, Hynix, Elpida, etc.);

Hope that helps!

 

Before upgrading ram,,,check out how much ram is being used by yourself on a regular basis,,some programs want lots of ram to run,,get a couple of these going and few other multitasks and ram can shrink quite quickly.

If your using lots of ram and windows is using page file a lot,,you'd see improvement with increased ram.

Try to add evenly so that you have 2 and 2,,4 and 4,,ect installed,,symmetrical dual channel is fastest read/write speeds for ram

Cheers
3Fees

 

^ +1
No one can tell you what you really need without knowing the workload characteristics on your W520. Therefore, it's best for you to monitor usage yourself and expand as necessary.

Since your W520 has four memory slots and 4G sticks are fairly cheap, I'd suggest you start with 12G and go from there. Adding a 4th stick to get to 16g would be easy & cheap.

Depending upon your 'development' workload, you might want to even consider adding a ramdrive to your setup. This can be extremely useful if you do a lot of I/O(compiling programs, processing video, etc.). Of course, this would likely necessitate using more ram.

If you have a few extra bucks now, try using one or two 8G sticks in the mix, as this will allow you to go > 16G later, if you need to.

Memory's cheap, so get more than you think you'll need.

 

1. The W520 has 4 memory slots, more than likely Lenovo has one 4GB stick in there. I'd buy another and if that's not enough you can always get to more for a total of 16G's.

2. Really depends on what you doing, but if you follow the above point you can check if you need more than 8GB's.

3. According to Intel, your processor supports: 1066MHz, 1333MHz, and 1600MHz memory. Faster is better.

 

"Faster" memory isn't actually any better in any real life situation if you're using a discrete GPU.

 

If your laptop came with 1 x 4 GB, then sticking another 8 GB in there for a total of 12 GB would force single channel mode, which would probably hurt more than it would help.

On the other hand, if it came with 2 x 2 GB, then adding 8 GB would be a good idea.

 

Peon, if it had 1x 4GB it was already in Single Channel mode.

Also, with 12GB as in your example; the 8GB would be running in Dual Channel mode and the 4GB would be in Single channel mode (also known as asynchronous Dual Channel mode).

See:
Synchronous vs. asynchronous Dual Channel : You Want 4 GB RAM on Your Notebook?