What ram upgrade for alienware m17x r3

[badasschris]

Hi I have just bought a m17xr3 (will arrive withing 10 days !! so slow) and would like to know the best cost effective memory upgrade

It comes with 2x2gb and has 4 dimm slots. I was thinking of adding just 1x4gb to a spare slot to make it 8gb, is it ok to have 2,2,4,0 in the slots? I read something about them needing to be the same for the ram to be in dual channel mode, is that true? The other thing is I see there are 2 easy to get top slots and 2 requiring the keyboard to be removed. If it turns out the easy to reach ones are filled with the 2x2 I was thinking of just replacing one with a 4gb making it 6 overall. Is that a good idea?

Thanks


Specs for laptop below if that helps


Alienware M17xR3 : Nebula Red
Blu-ray Disc (BD) Combo (Reads BD and Writes to DVD/CD)
Wireless: Dell 375 Bluetooth Card
320 GB SATA Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
Carry Case : Not Included
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium (64 BIT)
Graphics: 2 GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon HD 6970M w/ PowerXpress
Misc
Display: 17.3 inch WideHD+ (1600 x 900) WLED LCD
Battery : Primary 9-cell 90W/HR LI-ION
Processor: Intel Core i7-2630QM (2.00GHz, 6MB cache, Quad Core) with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 2.80 GHz
4 GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz (2 DIMMs)
Back Up Media Not Included
Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Reader
Misc
Wireless : Dell Wireless 1501 wireless-N
Certified Refurbished

 

[Plec]

Welcome ot the forums.

Hi I have just bought a m17xr3 (will arrive withing 10 days !! so slow) and would like to know the best cost effective memory upgrade

What are you going to be mainly using the laptop for?

The most cost effective upgrade may be buying nothing - if your usage is light apps and gaming you wouldn't get any benefit from installing another 4Gb.

However, if you need another 4Gb you would be better off buying 2x 2Gb so that the full 8Gb runs in dual channel mode. And be sure to buy memory that is a match or as close a match as possible to the frequency, timings and voltage of your present memory (use CPUz memory to find this out - and the BIOS for voltage).

If your unsure post back the timings and voltage.

 

[badasschris]

Welcome ot the forums.



What are you going to be mainly using the laptop for?

The most cost effective upgrade may be buying nothing - if your usage is light apps and gaming you wouldn't get any benefit from installing another 4Gb.

However, if you need another 4Gb you would be better off buying 2x 2Gb so that the full 8Gb runs in dual channel mode. And be sure to buy memory that is a match or as close a match as possible to the frequency, timings and voltage of your present memory (use CPUz memory to find this out - and the BIOS for voltage).

If your unsure post back the timings and voltage.

I will be mainly gaming and I suppose with 2gb on the card I may not need any more ram, but just thought 6 or 8 sounds better

how does the dual channel mode work and does it give much improvement? to have dual channel do all ram slots need to be equal? so either 2,2,2,2 or 4,4,4,4 or can they be in pairs e.g. 2,2,4,4 ?

I haven't got the laptop yet but will post back with the ram info when I get it.

Oh and thanks for the welcome

 

[Gilbert89]

Unless when multi tasking, gaming and so on if your applications are not using the entire 4GB of Ram there would be no speed difference, although if programmes seem to hang and there isn't enough memory you sure would benefit from addtional ram.

The Basics.