CL & MHz confusion!

jonifen

jonifen

jonifen

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Joined
29 Sep 2004
Posts
165
Hi,

I have a Sony Vaio VGN-C2M/W laptop which currently has 1Gb (2x 512Mb) PC-4300 (according to the manual and CPU-Z, although it is surely PC-4200?).

Anyway, I'm after upgrading it to 2Gb (the maximum for the laptop), and have been looking around and a particularly well known memory manufacturer currently have two different 2Gb kits (2x 1Gb) for sale: PC-4200 (CL = 4) and PC-5300 (CL = 5) both kits are the same price.

Now, the position I am in at the moment is that I don't know which to go for.
I used to aim for a low CL in the past, and keep the MHz synced with the FSB on the board, but my desktop has a 533MHz FSB (P4 2.4GHz) with the memory running at 333MHz (PC-2700) rather than at 266MHz (PC-2100) which means it is out of sync with the CPU right? I do find a performance loss (not hugely though) if I drop the memory to 266MHz speeds.

Basically, to cut a long story short, should I go for higher MHz and a higher CL on the memory or vice versa (lower MHz and therefore lower CL)?


Sorry for going on a bit... Thanks in advance,
Jon
 
Which CPU does the laptop have?

There's no real point in running the memory faster than the FSB, so you may as well get the PC4200.
 
Well the T5500 runs off a 166mhz FSB, so the current PC2-4300 is already running considerably faster than the FSB (unless Sony have down-clocked the memory).

Again I would just stick to the PC-4200.
 
OK, it's been a while since I did anything with hardware so wasn't sure which to look at.

Cheers for pointing me in the right direction :)

Thanks,
Jon
 
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