Last minute advice, I'm about to get my envy 14

Hey everyone

I am almost ready to purchase my Envy 14 and wanted some quick spec info before I buy it. Okay I know for a fact, I'm getting the 1600x900 screen and i5. I was leaning towards the 520M, but I don't think I need it, it's not like the lil speed bump will help me with my light-mid gaming(TF2, Mass Effect, Just Cause 2, and AC 2).

Right now I use a Dell E6400(professor's laptop), Core Duo 2.1Ghz, 2GB of RAM, and XP SP3. I can only play TF2 and Portal on this machine the others fai badly. I also loose RAM I tend keep things open like Visual Studios, Smartphone Emulators, and around 10 FF tabs.

My question for you guys is the 6GB of RAM worth it? How much does win7 pro 64 bit use by its self? With the Dell I am always at 1.3 to 1.9 GB of ram. Right now I'm at 1240ish for the Envy, and spending 100 dollars for 2 more gigs seems silly, but I want some other opinions and if possible is there really any difference between the 450M and 520'?

 

Firefox is RAM hog almighty.

Switch to Chrome or Chromium. You shouldn't need the 6 GB IMO. I use 4 and the 520m and it's fine. And I usually have a lot more open than you do. Just in more efficient programs.

You'll also want MSI Afterburner to overclock your GPU.

 

4 is more than enough for most people and tasks, and as long as you don't have tons of stuff open while you game, it will be plenty for that also.

Also, the difference between the 450 and 520 I deemed was not worth it, as it wouldn't help gaming at all and nothing else I do really needs CPU. If you're just going to browse and play games, even an i3 should be enough.

Windows 7 uses different amounts based on the system specs, on a netbook with only 1gb ram it would take up about 600 megs, but on my envy (4 gigs) it takes over 1 gig. This is just by default of course, I could chop my memory usage down by disabling unnecessary features, but you don't need to do that if you have an excess of RAM.

 

win7 caches some programs in ram and leaves them there (it empties the ram if that ram is needed by some other program)

 

unless you will run applications that can really make use of large amounts of RAM (for example, VMware, or working with very large image files (1-2GB+) in photoshop and creative suite apps, performing color timing on huge video files, etc.), you will not likely see any improvement in going from 4GB to 6GB. Definitely no improvements for gaming, unless you will run several demanding games at the same time for some reason and switch back and forth.

Performance Summary : Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM?

The 8GB/64-bit advantage - More RAM doesn't always mean better performance | ZDNet

Review - Is More Memory Better? | bit-tech.net

 

Huzzah! thanks guys

@moviemarketing thanks for the links, but can you be more specific with regards to VMware? I've used VMware twice for webOS, just to check it out. I currently taking the wait and see approach w/ HP though. So I don't use VMware right now, but may in the future.

 

That's weird. It shows 4GB of RAM out-performing 8GB of RAM for games? (unless I'm reading it incorrectly) ...it's only by a 1-5% margin, though.

 

For most games it looks about the same, or a very, very slight improvement in load times and FPS going from 4GB to 8GB; however, some of the tests these reviewers performed with games showed a very slight decrease in frame rates in 8GB vs 4GB and they attributed that to what they called a slightly "lower memory performance" using 4 DIMMs instead of 2 DIMMs.

 

I don't use any virtual machines myself, you may want to ask someone who uses them a lot. As far as I know, with VMware you can run multiple instances of WindowsXP or other operating systems at the same time on your computer, so obviously, each of these instances uses a certain amount of RAM and if you run many at once they cumulatively eat up a great deal of RAM.
Crysis + 9 VMs: Core i7 and 24GB RAM

 

Okay, I will stick with the 4GB, thanks everyone.