which is better?

Aod · 19 Sep 2008 at 15:54

i bought some new ram for my laptop, and instead of buying 2x 1GB i bough 1x 2GB.

after installing the new 2GB dimm into one of the slots, i thought i might as well try leaving one of the old 512MB dimms still in there (because toshiba say the max for my laptop is 2GB) lo-and-behold, the laptop works fine with 2.5GB of ram.

anyway, the new ram is PC2-5300 and the old stuff is PC2-4200.

my question is, is it better to have 2.5GB of ram running at 266MHz than 2GB running at 334MHz?

Tetras · 19 Sep 2008 at 16:00

I doubt you'd notice a lot of difference between them. If the .5 in the 2.5 actually gets used, stick with it.

ZedPowered · 19 Sep 2008 at 19:06

common sense says 2.5 is faster.

Aod · 19 Sep 2008 at 19:40

but common sense doesn't take into account that the peak transfer speed difference between 4200 and 5300 is a Gigabyte per second!

Tetras · 19 Sep 2008 at 19:41

Well technically, if the CPU used a 266 Mhz FSB running in sync at 266 may actually be faster than async at 333 but all in all, I don't think you'll notice any difference in speed.

If the extra memory gets used, you might as well use it

Aod · 19 Sep 2008 at 20:09

Tetras said:
Well technically, if the CPU used a 266 Mhz FSB running in sync at 266 may actually be faster than async at 333 but all in all, I don't think you'll notice any difference in speed.

If the extra memory gets used, you might as well use it

well, its a 133MHz bus, so i don't think that FSB:MEM sync is going to be a factor

i'll leave it as 2.5GB for now.