Is it worth it to put in 16 GB in the HP laptop that I have?

The laptop in my sig.

Does it have a good A8 processor? Is it supposed to be fast? Some people told me that even though in the specifications it says it only goes up to 8GB, it should actually take up to 16GB, and the reason why it says it takes only up to 8GB is because it already has a 4GB stick in one slot so that if you put another 4GB in the other slot it would be 8GB, but if you take the 4GB out and put in 8GB stick in each slot it would be 16GB. True?

What would be limitations of the A8 processor? What things couldn't it do?

 

The question is, do you need 16GB of RAM? What are your main tasks? If you just browse Internet and watch movies 4GB of RAM is enough.

 

Yes I do, as I want to have a lot of things open. I speak from experience. Even 16GB i7 iMacs have frozen on me. So I probably need more like 32GB.

 

I have watched movies with 8GB and it starts fanning like crazy. Which is loud, and unbearable.

 

Fan noise indicates heat. Heat does not indicate heavy RAM usage...

 

Not all freezes are due to running out of RAM...

 

Do you have like a lot of toolbars installed in your browser?
Silly jokes aside, how does your Pavilion perform so far? Do you feel the need for more RAM?

Have you actually looked inside? It only has one stick? That's very strange...

 

Yes I do feel the need for more ram as it only has 4GB.
Does not fan noise indicate heavy RAM usage most times?
When I ran the Activity Task, the RAM was maxed and the GPU (I think that's what it was) was 50% full. Does that mean that if I get 8GB RAM and use all those 8GB, GPU would be full, and if I tried to use 16GB I wouldn't be able to because the GPU could only handle 8GB RAM worth of workload?

Yes, I looked inside and it's only one stick.

 

no fan noise is inductive of heat, and not RAM. it sounds like you have a bunch of processes taking up your system.

 

You could definitely benefit from an additional 4 GB of RAM, whether you need 16 is probably debatable. I typically use just under 6 GB for OS + browsing (~30 tabs, including at least one live stream).

I have heard of cases where the manufacturer states the laptop will only support 8 GB of RAM, but only because 8 GB SODIMMs were not available yet - people have successfully upgraded with no issues. It's worth figuring out if your particular CPU supports that much memory, too.

 

Just adding to the previous posts, fan = heat problems, nothing to do with RAM usage. Hell, even if you were maxing out your RAM usage, the chips on those DIMMs don't produce enough heat to cause the fans to kick in.

And, speaking from experience, a lot of freezes I've seen can mostly be attributed to crap code in the program in question (either some company's code or my own code). After that, certain sites will freeze due to certain parts of that site causing problems (this happens to me sometimes when Facebook is loading up, regardless of browser). RAM capacity would be at the very bottom of the possible causes list, and even then the worst that will usually happen is that Windows (or whatever OS you're running) will inform you that you've ran out of memory and will terminate the program.

Short answer to your question: No, it's not worth it. Well, unless you just feel like spending extra money just to spend extra money. Then in that case, why not? In all seriousness though, 4-8GB is enough.

 

More than likely- 8 GB per slot max.I Like my Micron-Crucial Ballistix Sport (2x8GB) 16GB DDR3L, always enough ram to multitask ect.

Cheers
3Fees

_____________________________________________________________________________________
HP Pavilion 17" AMD Elite A10-5750M-8750G-APU,Micron-Crucial Ballistix Sport- 16GB DDR3L- 1866Mhz with automatic Over/Under Clocking of DDR3 Ram by the AMD APU-1866 MHz Memory Controller-Built in the APU Architecture, Samsung Evo 250GB SSD,Logitec LS1- Laser Mouse 5000 DPI, Seagate Backup Plus USB 3.0 drive -1TB size, Windows 8.1 Full Retail Box Version, 64 Bit installed. I have Lexar S33 32GB USB 3 Jump Drive ~ 100/50 MB/s.

 

How would you rate this processor by the way?

Also this Video Graphics:

Also, how would my HP compare to my 15'' 2009 MBP? I know the MBP has much better screen but it is cracked, so I can only use it with an external monitor.

 

For daily tasks, the CPU is pretty much irrelevant. But anyway, you can compare your A8 to your MBP's C2D in benchmarks online if you like.

 

What about something like video editing? Or music making?

 

Hobby work? Sure, should work fine. Anything serious though? I'd get something more powerful.

 

What would be something more powerful that doesn't break the bank?

What would be the difference between hobby work and being serious?

 

Do you derive your paycheck from such work?

Anyway, laptop recommendations would depend on what you mean by "breaking the bank".

 

No I don't.

Let me rephrase "breaking the bank" to "the cheapest that can handle such work."

 

In that case, the cheapest solution will be to keep what you have and, depending on how long the task takes, go grab a coffee.

 

So the only difference would be that you would have to wait some more while you are saving a video or music file?

By the way, the color of my HP laptop is not very good. If I connect a IPS external monitor, would color gamut go up? I was afraid maybe the color might have to do with something internal (graphics card??), not just the screen?

 

If you connect a display with a higher color gamut than your laptop's gamut, then the image on the external will be of a higher gamut. That's a property of the monitor, not the GPU.

 

For what it's worth, Macs generally use more RAM than Windows PCs do these days. Vista gave Windows a reputation for being bloated, but 7 and 8 have improved on that, while OS X RAM usage has generally kept going up. So while you might need 16 GB on a Mac, you don't necessarily need that much to do the same thing on a PC.

Assuming it really is RAM that is the bottleneck, I'd recommend starting by buying one 8 GB module for the second slot. That would give you 12 GB total, and a huge boost over what you have now. But the key thing to determine is whether it's actually RAM that's your bottleneck, or CPU, or GPU, or the hard drive. It could be more than one. Fan noise indicates it's probably the CPU or GPU, but it's better to try to verify that via observing CPU usage with Task Manager, as well as RAM usage. 4 GB isn't very much these days, but that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't enough. I just spun up a Blu-Ray while leaving my web browsers with 15 tabs open, and am using less than 1.4 GB of memory total. Even on Vista you wouldn't need anywhere near 8 GB to watch a movie, although with a poor cooling system, that could indeed cause the fans to spin up.

 

I think it might reach bottleneck when only 8GB is being used, because when 4GB RAM was being fully used, the GPU (or was it CPU) was half used. So maybe if i get another 4GB in there for a total of 8GB maybe the Processor will reach the bottleneck at the same time the RAM will?

 

I don't see the logic in that...

 

What is the flaw in the reasoning?

 

RAM is just temporary storage for things and its usage is independent from the CPU. Not having enough RAM doesn't affect the CPI whatsoever; if you run out of RAM then your computer will start using parts of the hard drive as additional "RAM" (it'll be much slower though, since a HDD is much much slower than RAM). GPUs also generally aren't affected by what's going on in RAM either (especially dedicated GPUs). Integrated GPUs do use part of system RAM as VRAM (because integrated GPUs don't have their own), however the amount it usually very small and other programs can't use that part of RAM. Also, GPU usuage is usually also independent of memory anyway (either system RAM or VRAM), and it's not like an integrated GPU is powerful enough to saturate whatever system RAM is being used. Memory used by a GPU is only used to store the image before sending it out to the display, nothing to do with any spikes in GPU usage.

 

Somebody on another forum wrote "
You could try a stick of 8GB in the 2009 if you're running Lion or higher as Apple enabled support for the 2010 model which uses the same memory controller, keep in mind once you cross past the 8GB mark booting back to a Snow Leopard can't be done. I'm guessing Apple held out 16GB support for a native 64-bit OS due to kernel limitations of SL."

Is that true?

 

Presuming you're dealing with a Core 2 Duo CPU, no it's not.

None of them will run a 8GB stick, regardless of OS.

 

Wrong - OWC Announces MaxRAM Memory Upgrades to 16GB for 2010 Mac mini, MacBook and MacBook Pro | Other World Computing Blog

I have a C2D 2.4 mid-2010 13" MBP with a 16GB kit waiting to go in it. Unfortunately the price has doubled from what is shown on that page.

 

So it would only work for a 2010 MBP? 2009 MBP would be out of question?

 

Correct. Nothing below mid-2010 will support 16GB, and for the mid-2010s, currently ONLY the 13" MBP will support it, the 15" and 17" will not. This is because the 13" uses a different graphics chip than the 15/17, and Apple released an updated firmware only for the 13" that just happened to include 16GB support in it.


BTW, odds are VERY good that your HP laptop will support 16GB. I received a G7-2297nr with an A6-4400 in the mail today with only a single 2GB chip in it. I had the old 2x2GB chips that came in my 13" MBP (I upgraded to 2x4 when it was new), so I threw them in it just for kicks to see if it would handle the 8500 speed (most places say to use 10600), and it did. So I pulled out the 2x8GB set I have waiting to go into the 13" MBP, and it booted to BIOS just fine, no errors, and sees the 16GB. I can't test through to an OS yet, as I don't have a hard drive in it.

Here's another lower model G7 with 16GB - https://forums.geforce.com/default/...d-double-the-max-of-8gb-am-i-gonna-break-it-/

 

Thank you! I'll be buying 2x8 GB soon.

BTW, I took out the 8gb ram in my 2009 MacBook Pro to return the RAM because since one slot is out of order, I didn't think one stick was useful, so it would be better to return it and buy 4GB Ram.

To replace it the RAM in the MBP, I put in the 4GB stick from HP laptop, but when I boot it, it started making beeping noise every 3 second and the screen won't turn on.

Is the RAM that came with the HP laptop incompatible with the 2009 Mac?

Btw, is there a particular type of 2x8 RAM that you might recommend for this HP laptop?

I think the problem might be that both slot needs to be filled, and I just put the 4 gb stick in one slot and left the other slot empty? Perhaps it would work if I put in a ram from my old 2009 MBP 15'' in the remaining slot?

I opened up my macbook white 2008 to see if I could move the ram only to find out that the ram was differently shaped. And now I can't get the ram to click in the macbook white. Would they fix this free of charge at the apple store?

Also I noticed that the ram stank as if it was rotting. It's similar smell that I smell from old game packs that go into gameboy consoles. Is it poisonous?

—

update: I went to Apple Store and they took care of it. Now the 4GB RAM (2x2) from the 15 inch is in the 13 inch MBP. (But, since one slot is out of order, only 2GB works).


I’m thinking of adding 16GB, 7200 1 TB, and 256 SSD into the HP laptop. One thing I do worry is that what if it grows hot and fan starts spinning really loud. Until recently, I thought that having 16GB RAM will take care of the heat and noise. But somebody mentioned that the heat can be coming from the the processor. So I’m worried that the processor might not be strong enough to handle things and then then the laptop could grow really loud. If it was a MBP I could try to apply a cold gel pack at the bottom (I’ve tried it before and it worked), but I think it only works for MBP because it is made of aluminum, and so is a good conductor of heat. I’m guessing applying the gel pack to a laptop like HP (made of plastic) won’t do much and it would be loud as usual.

I’m afraid that I might have tho return everything if I found it being loud even with the 16GB, and I’ve already returned too many items at Amazon and I’m afraid being blacklisted from returning ever again.