Why no DDR3 RAM in FW and SR?

But they have it in the Z. Why...Just...why?

 

Cost/Price factors?

 

Cause it's a gimmick that's only needed for fools that want to spend ridiculous amounts of money ...

like me

But Duke you're not missing out on much because I expect it won't give any real performance increase except in some synthetic memory benchmarks.

 

Gotta have some extras for their flagship laptop, I suppose.

 

I refer to nixon's answer to why does Sony sell Vista 32bit laptops with 4GB:
'Because people want it'

 

lol yes.

My friend "I got 4 GB dude, i'm set, it's the best"

Me: "Vista hardly uses over 3 GB..somehting like 3.2"

My friend: "Oh well I just wanted it"

 

Mainly because they try to squeeze as much battery life as possible on the Z, which is targetted at people who want the best of technology, no matter the price (otherwise they'd be buying something else). There is little or no difference in performance between ddr2 and dd3 at the moment, because the gain in bandwidth in ddr3 is mostly offset by the loss in latency. So basically, it's not worth the money on cheap models (SR) or desktop replacement (FW). But it's (kind of!) worth it on flagship model aiming at best performance/battery life ratio....

 

that is why I am getting 3 gigs on the FW and not 4, the extra 100 bucks for the extra 4 gigs instead of 3 is not worth it for me.

 

Lolz, that's why you get 1 Gb ram then buy 4 GB on newegg for <80 dollars plus rebates = 60-70 dollars... the amount of money sony wants for ONE GB upgrade

 

Newegg doesn't ship to canada, and i may want to return the laptop if I don't like it, so being in canada is the better option.

 

Humm... the ATI specifications for the 3470 indicates the following:
ATI Radeon™ HD 3400 Series - GPU Specifications
181 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
64-bit DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
32-bit floating point texture filtering
Indexed cube map arrays
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
Gather4 texture fetching

 

Yeah, that is the dedicated RAM (128MB for the SR) for the GPU which is separate from the system RAM.

 

This RAM included on the VGN FW139E is too slow for you?

Speed : 800MHz

Type : DDR2 SDRAM

Installed : 3GB PC2-6400 (2GBx1 + 1GBx1)

 

What? I was pointing out the that DDR3 RAM was for the video only. I really could care less about DDR3 RAM for the system since it provides little benefit for the added cost. DDR2 800 MHz is probably overkill for discrete video. The real benefit for the increased memory bandwidth is for integrated video.

 

I'd bet when prices of DDR3 come down below DDR2 as it goes back up, then I'm sure we'll see Sony switch over to using it for their other lines like the FW and SR in future model updates.

Now if only we could get 64-bit OS's from them on a regular basis! At least they've put their foot in the water with the FW170J/H.