Vaio FW RAM Upgrade: Worth it?

Hey,

I've got a Sony Vaio FW and all it's details are in my signature. It's model number (as far as I know) is VGN-FW16G. When I checked with the Crucial Memory Advisor Tool ( http://www.crucial.com/) it's recommendation was:

2GB 200-pin SODIMM
* Module Size: 2GB
* Package: 200-pin SODIMM
* Feature: DDR2 PC2-6400

Firstly, would someone be able to confirm this for me? And do you reckon upgrading the RAM will actually make a noticeable difference? The main thing I want to see an improvement in is program load times and game performance. Mostly gaming as in most games, whenever the resolution is set high the frame rate drops considerably so I usually set it really low, which defeats the purpose of the 1600*900 widescreen.

Thanks in advance.

 

Crucial is very good in recommending replacement/upgrade ram module.

I would definitively bump the system up with 4gigo ram when running Vista. But you will not see much of a game performance gain as far as FPS concern, since this depends very much on graphic cards.

cheers ...

 

Okay, thanks for that. Anyone else feel like agreeing or disagreeing?

 

I got 4 gb ram and im going to buy 2 gb more from amazon just because i got some free gift cards and ram is soo cheap right now so i figured why not. it looks like its going to be the same exact ram as that recomendation. DDR2 pc2-6400 800MHz. and you will definatly see a difference if your running vista with only 2 Gb. if u wanna play games or do anything else that uses large amount of memory then that extra 2 gb will deffinatly help becuase vista is a hog when it comes to memory

 

Personally, I am running Vista very comfortably with 2GB of RAM, and only games push RAM usage to above 80%. But, as RAM is inexpensive, it could still provide a small boost in performance.

However, it will not help your gaming performance at all, really. Your machine's bottleneck is the weak ATI 3470 graphics card, that's what's giving you low framerates, not the lack of RAM.

Let me make an analogy, which I read recently elsewhere on the forum (I think Forever_Melody used it?):
To make a cake well, you need 2 cups of milk and 4 cups of flour. You have 4 cups of flour already, but you only have 1 cup of milk. Adding more flour isn't going to make your cake any better - you still can't make it.

In this case, the flour is your RAM and the milk is your graphics card. No matter how much more RAM you add, your gaming performance will be the same.

In cases other than gaming, the extra RAM could help with having lots of applications open, though, so if you have the money, it's not a bad upgrade.