E6400 Ram Speed

I plan on ordering an e6400 to replace my crappy thinkpad z61p which has spend more time with lenovo than in my home...

while looking at the dell premium partner who offers the student rebates over here in Austria and Germany I stumbled across something strange:
apparently (at least according to the specs) e6500, e5500 and e5400 all use 800 Mhz RAM while the e6400 only uses RAM clocked at 667 MHz.
Is that true or a mistake? How does it hit the performance?

 

This is a mistake on Asknet's selection page. If you go on to the configurator, 800 MHz clocked DDR2 RAM shows up on any of the 5 models.

 

It is DDR2-800, but as you will see when my review surfaces, using DDR2-667 does not affect performance by much. The new Intel chipset has better bandwidth than the old one but is still the limiting factor for the performance.

John

 

thanks for the quick replies...

so with the built-in controller there is no possibility of installing ddr3-ram?

what do you recommend the 250 gb hdd @ 5400rpm or the 200 gb @ 7200 with free fall sensor?

up till now i only had ibm's with a software which did this - is a software like that available for dells or will I just have to live with head crashes (should they occur)?

 

It the moment there's no compelling evidence that DDR3 significantly improves performance, but we could do with more results from people with DDR3.

The DDR3 RAM slot is different (204 pin vs 200 pin) so a different board is required.

John