4GB of RAM for m1330 on Ebay for $229, so I ordered my 1330

with 1GB, figuring I would swap out for the 4 GB. It was $1000 on Dell's site , yikes!

I believe it may be slower than 800mhz, 667mhz to be precise, but I figure I would not be able to see the difference.

Any one know of a flaw in this reasoning?

Also, I would like to get a better price on mine, and was thinking of cancelling the order, telling them it is too long to ship (august 27th, last I checked.)

But of course, I would strongly re-consider for a $400 or so price break!

Anyways, this seems to be the hottest laptop thta is not out yet I would love to be first at the coffee shop with this. THEN maybe that sweet coffee girl would pay attention to me ))

I got www.dell-m1330.com as a blog, not sure if it resolves yet, and have put nothing up yet.

I ordered through Dell Preferred financing. No interest seemed pretty good.

I welcome any commenst on this overly long post. Nice to see such action here. thanks, Dave

 

4GB for $210 w/ shipping

 

Or see our RAM deals thread. Some times the $160 for 4GB comes back...

 

Assuming you are running a T7x00 processor, where the FSB is 800MHz, running 667MHz RAM means that the memory bus and the CPU bus are out of sync. To keep things in sync, the system will need to insert wait states on the CPU side, meaning that the CPU will sometimes need to wait on the RAM. There should only be a minimal impact on performance, though.

Also keep in mind that if you are running a 32-bit OS, you'll likely not be able to access more than about 3GB of the 4GB RAM, as the system needs to reserve address space for video, bios, etc.

 

667 RAM is the best you can get with Santa Rosa...it does not support 800MHz RAM.

 

In that case, just ignore my post ...

 

frys will have it back in stock soon for $160

 

WOW, awesome, thanks, I will keep an eye on the places mentioned. Yes, I do I know I will not see the full 4, still, one cannot order 3

I am really happy I found this forum again! Lots of laptop nuts like me!

 

Its a nice laptop,, but its not a magical laptop.

Back to subject, unless you plan to use Vista 64-bit your computer will only be able to utilize about 3gb of RAM.

 

I'm also interested in upgrading from 2gb of ram to 4gb of ram. So if you have 4gb of ram, the system will only see 3.2 gb as it has to reserve the remainding 0.8gb for video,bios, etc? How about if you only have 2,or 3gb of memory...will the system still use/reserve some of that memory resulting 1.2 or 2.2 gb of available memory?

My system has a 256 bm 8400M GT gpu with uses turbo cache..can it uses some of the 0.8gb of unavailable ram?

Do you see any improvements between 2 and 4gb of ram for gaming, photo editing, video editing, etc?

 

The system isn't reserving RAM, it's reserving memory address space. If you have <3GB of RAM, then the actual PHYSICAL RAM only needs 3GB (or less) of address space. In a 32-bit system, there can only be 4GB of address space available, and lots of stuff requires address space (so the OS can find it). Hence, a typical 32-bit system needs about 1GB of address space for things other than physical system RAM.

 

Seriously? Where did you come up with this...

The FSB and CPU do not have to be in sync. There are no 'wait states' inserted. There is a memory bus and then there's a front side bus. They do not have to be in sync. They both connect to the northbridge, which handles memory access. Santa Rosa supports dual channel DDR2, so at 667MHz, you're looking at 10.67GB/s of bandwidth. The 800MHz FSB provides about 6.4GB/s. So no wait states, the only performance impact will be due to and unsaturated FSB.

 

That's just false. The 800mhz FSB is quad pumped, meaning the bus speed is actually 200mhz. (As opposed to last gen's 133mhz). DDR2 is double data rate, which means it's actually 667/2 = 333mhz. Having the FSB : memory speed ratio to be 1:1 is best, but at this point, difficult. I remember the last time we had that was back in the day of Athlon 64s/XPs (400mhz DDR, 200mhz FSB)