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I'm looking at getting a new laptop towards the end of the month, and so far Googling hasn't been terribly productive so I figured I'd see if anyone here might know. It's going to be used for some gaming and a hefty amount of multi-tasking (a Thinkpad W500 is the system I'm currently looking at getting, with a 512mb video card), and I was wondering if there were any noticeable performance benefits in getting 4gb over 3 outside of benchmarks since I'm trying to shave costs where feasible, but want the most performance for the machine. (The OS will be Vista Ultimate, so I don't have to worry about the 2gb cap).

This is a Laptop right? Vista? How much multi-tasking exactly? I think you'll notice 3gigs of 2gigs, but not 4 gigs over 3gigs.

Mr Bean wrote:This is a Laptop right? Vista? How much multi-tasking exactly? I think you'll notice 3gigs of 2gigs, but not 4 gigs over 3gigs.

Multi-tasking as in Firefox with 20+ tabs, lots of flash videos, multiple big PDFs (50+mb range), h.264 video files, and semi-intensive games like the Witcher. I suspected I might not see a massive performance boost, but I prefer avoiding having to upgrade where possible so I'm wanting to check in advance and hopefully get some actual stats. And yes, definitely a laptop.

IN the case of what you are doing, more is better, and get the best video card you dam well can.

Solauren wrote:IN the case of what you are doing, more is better, and get the best video card you dam well can.

The video card on the laptop model I'm looking at is 512mb ATI, so I'm not terribly worried about that side. I'm just hoping to shave some extra cash off in other areas and RAM looks like the big one right now (it'll knock off $100 from the overall cost by going 3gb).

Are you running Vista64? Do you regularly use more than 3GB of commit charge?

phongn wrote:Are you running Vista64? Do you regularly use more than 3GB of commit charge?

My current machine is 32-bit Vista with 2gb of Ram, which I find insufficient. The machine I'm getting will be 64-bit though, but I don't know if upping the configuration to 4gb offers enough of a tangible benefit over 3gb to be worthwhile.

General Zod wrote:My current machine is 32-bit Vista with 2gb of Ram, which I find insufficient. The machine I'm getting will be 64-bit though, but I don't know if upping the configuration to 4gb offers enough of a tangible benefit over 3gb to be worthwhile.

The size of programs and data sets is constantly growing. If you're planning to upgrade the laptop to 8gb anyway in two or three years time, then 3gb might make sense. But if you don't want the hassle of upgrading, you might as well just put 4g in now. Surely it can't be that much more?

Starglider wrote: The size of programs and data sets is constantly growing. If you're planning to upgrade the laptop to 8gb anyway in two or three years time, then 3gb might make sense. But if you don't want the hassle of upgrading, you might as well just put 4g in now. Surely it can't be that much more?

It's an extra $100 to upgrade it to 4gb. Not exactly unaffordable considering what I'll be shelling out anyway, but like I said, I'm trying to shave costs where feasible. (I don't anticipate needing 8gb any time in the foreseeable future, though).

Is it too much trouble for you to install RAM yourself? Manufacturers generally jack up the cost of additional RAM by an absurd degree compared to what you can buy it for separately, so it's usually best to buy with the default amount of RAM and then add the rest yourself. Though, I don't know if that holds true over where you are. In any case, if you get 3gb you'll get better performance from 2x512 + 2x1gb (dual channel for double bandwidth) vs 1gb + 2gb or 1gb x3, so check that before you order.

Seggybop wrote:Is it too much trouble for you to install RAM yourself? Manufacturers generally jack up the cost of additional RAM by an absurd degree compared to what you can buy it for separately, so it's usually best to buy with the default amount of RAM and then add the rest yourself. Though, I don't know if that holds true over where you are. In any case, if you get 3gb you'll get better performance from 2x512 + 2x1gb (dual channel for double bandwidth) vs 1gb + 2gb or 1gb x3, so check that before you order.

Is it too much trouble for you to actually read what I post? I don't give a shit about the cost or the difficulty involved in installing, I give a shit about the actual performance difference and whether I will notice any significant benefit from the extra gig.

General Zod wrote:Is it too much trouble for you to actually read what I post? I don't give a shit about the cost or the difficulty involved in installing, I give a shit about the actual performance difference and whether I will notice any significant benefit from the extra gig.

If you don't care about the cost then why state initially that you're trying to shave it off? It should be pretty clear from other responses that more memory will definitely not hurt, so do you not want the most you can get for X money? Anyway, if you read what I said, you would have gathered that you could potentially lose half your memory speed depending on how the manufacturer chooses to arrange 3gb, which could hurt you more than having less memory if your load doesn't consume so much, but if that's not a relevant performance difference for you then continue along as you are.

Seggybop wrote: If you don't care about the cost then why state initially that you're trying to shave it off? It should be pretty clear from other responses that more memory will definitely not hurt, so do you not want the most you can get for X money? Anyway, if you read what I said, you would have gathered that you could potentially lose half your memory speed depending on how the manufacturer chooses to arrange 3gb, which could hurt you more than having less memory if your load doesn't consume so much, but if that's not a relevant performance difference for you then continue along as you are.

It's not that I don't care about the cost. It's that I'm trying to shave off useless additions that won't give me any real gain and I can't know whether or not the 4gb of ram is worth the extra $100 without real numbers based on benchmarks. Posting utterly banal trivia any moron would know is utterly useless and the way you said it was quite frankly incredibly irritating.

Forgive me for trying to be useful. It's hard to know what's trivial from your perspective based on your simple question. If you want some concrete data then load up all the software you're planning to use at once as a worst-case scenario and then check how much memory is being used in taskmgr and you'll know how much you need to prevent paging to the hard disk (a huge performance hit) and you can decide yourself what that's worth to you.
Synthetic benchmarks are pretty useless for this situation because they test isolated tasks and don't reflect your personal workload.

Seggybop wrote:Forgive me for trying to be useful. It's hard to know what's trivial from your perspective based on your simple question. If you want some concrete data then load up all the software you're planning to use at once as a worst-case scenario and then check how much memory is being used in taskmgr and you'll know how much you need to prevent paging to the hard disk (a huge performance hit) and you can decide yourself what that's worth to you.
Synthetic benchmarks are pretty useless for this situation because they test isolated tasks and don't reflect your personal workload.

My posts were incredibly straight forward. I wanted number comparisons for the performance of 3gb ram vs 4gb ram, but I decided to give more detail because there's always someone who posts something incredibly banal and I was hoping to avoid that. Unfortunately that seems to have backfired.

Unrelated, but why not a T500? I've heard the graphics card is mostly the same in terms of performance for games, w/ the W500 having the workstation optimized card, but no switchable graphics- I would think for the normal person not running CAD or 3d modeling apps switchable graphics would be more useful.

"Banal" stuff below:

For my use, I find the difference between 4GB and 2GB negligible on my desktop, except when running a VM, and my workload is typically 20+ tabs, a bunch of open PDFs, and netbeans. I very rarely go past 3 (including disk cache) even w/ a VM. h264 decoding/encoding doesn't really affect RAM usage significantly. The only things that really significantly affect memory usage in my experience is large image editing and doing a text search through many files on a network drive causing the OS to cache them.

Pu-239 wrote:Unrelated, but why not a T500? I've heard the graphics card is mostly the same in terms of performance for games, w/ the W500 having the workstation optimized card, but no switchable graphics- I would think for the normal person not running CAD or 3d modeling apps switchable graphics would be more useful.

I can get more for my money with the W500. It's a little bit more expensive, but I can get roughly the same components plus a 512mb video card vs a 256mb one at nearly the same cost. The T500 was under consideration for awhile, but I don't really need the switchable graphics feature.

"Banal" stuff below:

For my use, I find the difference between 4GB and 2GB negligible on my desktop, except when running a VM, and my workload is typically 20+ tabs, a bunch of open PDFs, and netbeans. I very rarely go past 3 (including disk cache) even w/ a VM. h264 decoding/encoding doesn't really affect RAM usage significantly. The only things that really significantly affect memory usage in my experience is large image editing and doing a text search through many files on a network drive causing the OS to cache them.

That's actually somewhat useful, but it's sounding like 4gb might not be worth the effort. (What I suspected, but I was hoping for confirmation/denial on that).

General Zod wrote:but I can get roughly the same components plus a 512mb video card vs a 256mb one at nearly the same cost.

Repeat after me kids. Graphics memory is not what I use to decide what to buy.

Mr Bean wrote:This is a Laptop right? Vista? How much multi-tasking exactly? I think you'll notice 3gigs of 2gigs, but not 4 gigs over 3gigs.

I think so too, 3gigs was plenty when I was using it. I can think of precisely one situation where having 4gigs would have helped and that's not very common. Vista (for me) seems to use about a gig of ram just running, so I'd budget for a extra one gig over what I would need, waiting for the desktop to page back into memory after an alt-tab is ugly.

4gigs would probably get a you a tiny boost in speed, I doubt 3gigs would dual channel correctly. Vista will cache anything you don't use, so you might as well buy 4gigs of ram, saves potential hassle later, $100 seems a bit excessive though.

General Zod wrote:It's an extra $100 to upgrade it to 4gb. Not exactly unaffordable considering what I'll be shelling out anyway, but like I said, I'm trying to shave costs where feasible.

That's way too high. A 2GB DDR SO-DIMM stick should cost you $50 at most, retail. It costs the manufacturer a lot less, plus they're saving the cost of putting a 1GB stick in there, so you're being ripped off.

I suggest getting the laptop with as little memory as possible (1GB?) and putting in a couple of generic retail 2GB sticks yourself.

No one is going to be able to give you meaningful figures about 3GB vs 4GB. I really doubt any hardware site out there is going to test something like that because it's so dependent on workload and system configuration. For working sets below 3GB (minus OS overhead) in size the benefit is negligable, for working sets between 3GB and 4GB in side it's potentially massive, for larger sets it gets steadily less dramatic.

A side question: How much RAM do the average to higher class system support these days?

Starglider wrote: That's way too high. A 2GB DDR SO-DIMM stick should cost you $50 at most, retail. It costs the manufacturer a lot less, plus they're saving the cost of putting a 1GB stick in there, so you're being ripped off.

Well, the laptop in this case uses DDR3 ram, and doesn't provide an option to have DDR2 installed. I've looked at a lot of other brands and the Thinkpad is looking to be the best option at the moment.

salm wrote:A side question: How much RAM do the average to higher class system support these days?

For laptops? Up to 8 gb.

salm wrote:A side question: How much RAM do the average to higher class system support these days?

8gb is the basic standard for most cheap motherboards based on popular chipsets, 16gb is starting to be come more common.

Baka^Ni wrote:4gigs would probably get a you a tiny boost in speed, I doubt 3gigs would dual channel correctly. Vista will cache anything you don't use, so you might as well buy 4gigs of ram, saves potential hassle later, $100 seems a bit excessive though.

Vista's file cache is wonderfully agressive. The difference between WinXP with 2gb, and Windows Vista with 8gb is quite large once it has learned that to cache and more importantly when to cache it.

Aye, thanks.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820227350
Only ~56$ for a single 2GB stick of DDR3