ram upgrade 1333mhz vs 1066mhz for i5-540m

Looking to upgrade the ram in my laptop to 4gb, now i'm guessing my 540m will be limited to only 1066mhz but i'm not a 100% sure on that, and would it really make much of a difference which company i went for (kingston, corsair, g skill)??

Also is it really worth getting more than 4gb of ram if I only push my laptop during gaming (don't do any video editing or anything else that really stresses the laptop)??

 

More RAM can never hurt except costing $$$.

The Arrandale processors do not support 1333 natively, I wouldn't pony up extra money for the faster RAM

 

I would go with the 1333 memory, there is no price premium anymore between the 1066 and 1333, and it may be usable in a future laptop.

 

+1 if you are planning to upgrade to another laptop with DDR3 RAM in the near future. However Tsunade_Hime is right that 1333 doesn't work natively at those clock speeds with an Arrandale. They get auto-downclocked to 1066 when detected by an i5.

 

Ya it's probably worth going for the 1333mhz, would it matter:

1) which company ram i chose (g skill, kingston, corsair, crucial)?

2) is it possible to flash ram (such as flashing kingston valueRam to kingston hyperX)

3) should i go for 6gb or 8gb ram over 4gb ( i do a lot of gaming, and usually have a few applications open at a time but definitely no video editing/photoshop)


thanks for all the help guys

 

if you use hibernate (like me) then saving/loading 8gb take twice the time then 4gb

 

I just bought an m17x r2 with this same i540.. Is it the CPU why it's limited to 1066? Or the board? I got such a deal I'm looking to upgrade to a 940xm so can I use 1333 after the swap?

 

Arrandale processors (i3/i5/dual core i7) only support 1066 natively. Only Clarksfield quad core i7s will do 1333 RAM. Now Sandy Bridge i3/i5/dual core i7 will do 1333 and quad core i7 will natively support 1600.

I disabled sleep, hibernate and standby on all my machines. Either they are running full blast or are turned off.

 

Appreciate all the response but can someone reply to my followup post in regards to:

1) does it matter which company i go for, for the ram (gskill, kingston, crucial, etc.)

2) is it worth upgrading to 6gb or 8gb instead of 4gb if i game a lot (no video editing or photoshop)

3) is it possible to flash normal kingston memory to hyperX (with tools such as thaiphoon)

thank you

 

Company makes no difference since none of those companies actually produce the memory. All memory comes from only a few sources (Samsung, Hynix, Micron, etc.) and all the companies that you have listed buy from them and rebrand them. Just stick with a company with a lifetime warranty. If you game a lot, 4GB is more than enough, but if you have the money to spend, then by all means get more. As for flashing, most likely not. Besides memory speeds and timing make no difference in any real life performance metric if you have a discrete GPU.