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Thread: 2Gb or 2Gb + 1Gb for Laptop

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    Senior Member usxhe190's Avatar
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    2Gb or 2Gb + 1Gb for Laptop

    Hi all,

    I have a spare 1Gb DDR2-667 (PC5300) laying around and I was thinking of putting this extra 1Gb of ram into my mum's laptop, which currently has dual channel 2Gb DDR2-800 (PC6400).

    Is the loss of dual channel and the downgrade from 800Mhz to 667Mhz worth it? She is running Vista Home Basic 32bit.

    Will the system used the extra memory as well given the laptop has a ATI HD4330 GPU with 512mb dedicated memory?

    Any help appreciated as always.
    Last edited by usxhe190; 17-08-2010 at 09:05 AM.

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    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    Re: 2Gb or 2Gb + 1Gb for Laptop

    Firstly check that it's compatible - you'll need the right divider in BIOS to run all your ram at 667 without downclocking the system, not to mention the obvious things like voltage (or form factor!)

    If it is, then yes, I'd say an extra gig for vista is certainly worth the loss of dual channel, and would probably be worth the loss of speed - RAM is still ~100x faster than a hard drive so it'll have quite an effect especially with Vista's precaching.

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    Senior Member usxhe190's Avatar
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    Re: 2Gb or 2Gb + 1Gb for Laptop

    Thanks kalniel, I presume Vista can use all of 3Gb even if the GPU has its own 512mb?

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    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    Re: 2Gb or 2Gb + 1Gb for Laptop

    Quote Originally Posted by usxhe190 View Post
    Thanks kalniel, I presume Vista can use all of 3Gb even if the GPU has its own 512mb?
    As long as you're patched up to SP1 or above then yep. Before SP1 there was a bug that applied to dx9 games which doubled the size of virtual address space taken up by graphics card ram, meaning there wasn't much left when you used cards with large amounts of memory. However 512mb would be fine, and even if it ate into it a little there would still be a benefit over 2gb.

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