M14X - 6GB or 8GB ram?

Hi all,

I'm new to this forum.

I'm gonna order an M14x soon and I was thinking whether I should opt for the 6gb or the 8gb ram. I recall reading somewhere that 6gb of ram is recommended for an i7 processor. Is that true?

 

If money is no object, get 8 through dell, but to let you know i have an m11x which i just sold to a family member, it had 4gb stock ram from dell. I upgraded this to 6gb by buying 4gb from crucial, at the cost of 33 pounds, dell are very expensive for something that litrally takes 3 minutes to do and much much cheaper. I then sold the 2gb stick i removed for 19 pounds on ebay making it about a 13 quid upgrade to 6gb. In short if u dont want hastle do it through dell. But dont let thought of upgrading yourself scare you its the easiest thing to do most ram sites scan your setup so you buy the right type ram, its really simple, if i can do it, trust me anybody can do it.

 

In true fact, it does not have hardly any difference on system's performance whether you have 6GB or 8GB of ram installed in your system. It does sound nice when you say it to someone what your specs are. In reality, 4GB of ram is sufficient enough to run a system using Win7 64-bit OS.

IN CASE you feel like upgrading the RAM yourself, don't buy it from Dell. Follow what the Dude has posted earlier because it's really cheaper if you do it yourself and doing it is well, idiot-proof to say the least.

Enjoy the system.

 

Thanks for the advice. I'm getting the 6gb upgrade done free, but I'll have to pay if I want the 8gb. Since you say that there's not much diff between the 6 and 8, I'll just stick with the 6gb. I'm thinking in the future if I do ever need 8GB, I can always upgrade.

 

For the same price as the 6GB to 8GB upgrade you could buy a full 8GB RAM kit for it and install it yourself. Even if you've never messed with computer hardware in your life, it's extremely easy provided you follow simple instructions.

 

I bought the Kingston 8GB 1600MHz PnP for ~$100 and installed in less than 2min.. gonna sell back the 4GB kit..

 

Probably you can stick to 4GB and ask for something else for free instead? Screen, carrying case, wifi, bluetooth, discount on processor, anything could do

 

Whenever you buy a Dell, always get the least amount of RAM you can and replace it with the desired amount (and speed) of RAM from Newegg (or wherever) upon arrival. Then you can sell the stock RAM on ebay. All told, you can get the higher RAM configurations for a fraction of what Dell charges.

Same goes for hard drives, to a lesser extent. Especially SSD's.

 

Sorry to invade on a different topic, but rather than start a whole new one I thought I'd ask here real quick.

It just takes 2 sticks right? So I would need 4gb x2?

 

That's correct.

 

Another reason to avoid 6gb is although you only need another 4gb stick to make it 8, I still believe it is best to have 2 identical rams for stability. Plus if you want to sell ram for some reason, 2gbx2 is going to be easier to trade than 2+4Gb.

 

The man speaks nothing but truth!
For the first two i7s the 6gb ram is good enough and even for the the strongest i7 for the m14x. It's just your choice on which one you really need. 1.5 gb vid card is the ideal as the other one is not that great, so yeh. If its free for the 6gb, then save yourself the money and just get that. Dell likes to charge a lot more then what things are worth(i guess for labor). Espically SSD's.

 

I personally left the ram at 4gb for two reasons.
Why have odd memory in dual channel. Ie a 4gb and a 2gb or pay dells memory prices.
The sensible option is to get your 8gb ( if you really need it) from somewhere else.

 

I went with 8gb (independently, no way in hell I'd go with Dell's prices for that), because of my SSD..I read in one of those SSD tweak forums that Window's paging does small writes to the drive, and that it can be turned off if you have lots of memory. I'm also going to be using XP in a virtual machine, so I'll always have plenty of memory to spare