T61p 8GB looks possible

I know the subject has been discussed before. Mostly it was a lot of naysayers claiming that there was some physical limitation that would limit the T61p (and other notebooks) to only 4GB RAM.

Since there isn't a real effective way to search these forums, I apologize if this is a repost.

The guy on this link claims to have a T61p with 8GB of RAM and 20+ VMs running simultaneously. He appears to know his stuff and it makes good reading.

http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs...-lenovo-thinkpad-t61p-now-has-8gb-of-ram.aspx

So, it looks like it is possible if you have a spare $1000 or so laying about to spend on RAM. I think I'll wait until that price drops - a lot.

 

If you look in Dell Latitude and Precision forum, you'll find another user, EricD who claimed to have 8GB with his D830 (15.4" Santa Rosa chipset).

 

Actually, you can get an 8GB for a lot less, more like $400:
G.SKILL 4GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 667

Or an 8GB kit from Kingston for $788:
8GB 667MHz DDR2 Non-ECC CL5 SODIMM

 

I wonder about that because it might happen that the 4gb sticks that pop out at lower prices are only ddr3, leaving the ddr2 sticks at high prices, in which case we would be totally screwed.
I was thinking the same thing the other day. It's something that would really increase the life span of my computer.

 

Grench, yes 8 GB is possible with SA chipset, but that also depends on your BIOS.

Increase the life span of your computer? That depends. Are you using all your 4 GB now? If not, then 8 GB won't give you any performance gain. Also, by the time that you can use all 8 GB, then maybe your other components will become the bottleneck.

 

So I went ahead and installed 2 of the 4 gb sticks from G.Skill on my T61p today (mostly for my own fun - I don't really need that much of memory). So far, everything seems to work fine, my system runs without any hickups until now and Windows system information recognizes the entire 8 gb. However, I was not able to run a memory test with PC doctor, and under 'device information' I got this funny message: (see attachment).

So I was wandering: do you think this is something I should worry about, i.e. that the value for 'Total Physical Memory' is actually higher than that for 'Maximum supported Memory'?

Thanks a lot for your thoughts!

 

Why don't you fill-up the memory by opening as many programs as possible?

 

Hi f4ding,
thanks for the good idea! I followed your advice and found that I can open a total of ~6.5 gb worth of virtual PCs (3 x 2000 MB, 1 x 512 MB), above that I get an error message telling me that I'm out of memory. So it looks as if I can use everything that is shown as 'free memory'. However, I'm still wondering what happened to the remaining ~1,5 GB?

 

If I recall correctly, there's another chipset limitation imposed by certain chipset. For example, if you try to configure a certain Clevo laptop, with 8GB of memory, the reseller will include an option that says something like "only 6.5GB available due to chipset limitation". I'm not saying that is it, but it could be.

Or it could be BIOS limitation. Dell D830 was capped at around 6GB before a new BIOS enables it to run at over 7GB. Search for EricD user name, and find his posts.

EDIT: Here is the thread

 

Thanks for the link, f4ding! I think I know now what was my misunderstanding: I had assumed that e.g. what is shown in task manager as 'cached' and 'free' should sum up to the amount of total memory used. I now realized that this is wrong: it seems to show total memory minus what is actually being presently used by Vista (e.g. in my case ~6.5 GB).
So probably the 'total supported memory= 4 GB' is just something the manufacturer wrote there, but does not mean anything in real life...??
Anyways, so far I seem to be able to use my full mem and am a happy camper!!

 

My x300, t61p, and newer macbook pros work fine with 8gb too! I got the 4gb dimms that someone posted in another thread from newegg, and bios on x300 and the t61p saw 8gb as did vista 64bit.

Thanks!

 

How about a link to that thread or a link to the product on NewEgg or similar so we can know which RAM you have had success with?

Thanks!

 

I would assume any DDR2 would work, no?