B130 owners - Good deal on 1GB DDR2 Memory $59.95 after $10 rebate

I'm posting this here on the Dell board, as that's the one I check to find out the latest on my new B130 Dell notebook.

I figured that a bit more memory would help performance a lot, considering the built-in video can take up to 128MB of system memory, and even with 512 Megs of memory, 128 taken away is a lot.

www.newegg.com has on sale 1 GB DDR2 Transcend brand memory modules, contains Samsung chips, 200 pin SO-DIMMs, 533 MHz, Cas latency 4, (PC2-4200), lifetime warranty.

It's priced at $69.95 per 1 GB stick, and a $10 mail-in rebate. Their sale is through Dec. 21, 2005. 3-day shipping is $4.81. I think they only charge sales tax in California, New Jersey, and Tennessee. I like not getting the extra 8% or more hit on sales tax.

At $59.95 after rebate it didn't sound like a bad price for a single module that size, and it does have some good comments from other users on the Newegg site. I don't know the Transcend brand from personal experience, but did notice that one of the reviewers on Newegg said it worked with his B130.

You might want to take a look at it. I know a memory upgrade can do wonders for system performance. I ordered one stick. See if you think it might work for your system if you've been wanting more memory. I don't expect you'll get dual channel performance if using it with another size and brand module, or if using it as a single module, but I am hoping the added memory will make up for the loss of dual channel.

I don't work for Newegg or have anything to gain from posting this. I have made a couple dozen orders through them over the last year and a half and have never had a problem with the company, and their delivery has always been on time (of course at Christmastime I guess it could be slower).

I thought some of you might be interested, but please make a well-informed purchase on your system requirements, compatibility, etc. I'm not making an endorsement of the product or the dealer, just mentioning the item and my past experience with Newegg.

 

Nice, I think I'd rather get two 512MB DIMMs though.

 

I was looking at two 512s myself, as it would have operated in dual channel mode. The cost for the Corsair Value Select series would have been about $90 with shipping. Of course, best case (if the wallet wasn't so thin right now) would have been to get two 1GB sticks and give the notebook more memory than it will ever require.

Also, I maxed out the 4 slots on my desktop with 512s, and any memory upgrade on that would get expensive now, so I decided to try one stick of this 1GB now on the desktop, will probably run it with one of the two 256s already in it and see if just loading with a lot of memory will make a difference. I may just run the one stick of 1GB and keep out the option in a few months to get another and max out the memory on the B130 and get dual channel back. But with buying the notebook, a case for it, a wireless optical mouse plus CHristmas shopping my bank account looks anemic. My wish list for my B130 was a larger capacity battery, so far unavailable it seems, and more memory. Thought this memory deal was the cheapest of my two wishes.

I've not noticed a particularly slow system, in fact I've been surprised at how speedy the Celeron CPU is. I'd always looked at the Celeron as the poor cousin to a real processor. However, my Celeron views are biased in the past when that processor was first introduced it had no cache memory at all and ran like a slug. Intel has gradually added more and more cache to the Celeron series, and improved it a lot.

The 1MB cache in this CPU should be very adequate. I've got a 2MB cache in the P4 in my desktop and actually had a performance DECREASE over my previous P4 with a smaller amount of cache.

The shared video and system memory on the B130 was one thing I didn't like, but since I was on a budget I couldn't go into a notebook with a high end video card. I do think that even with 512MB in my B130 I will hit a few snags when video memory needs take a chunk out of that and leave less than 400 Megs of memory for the operating system and other running programs. I tried running one of the high definition wmv video samples Microsoft is pushing and got a lot of stutter. I figured some was due to the Intel video onboard, but some of the stutter looked more like memory caching slowdowns. I know the Intel will never give video speed comparable to even an inexpensive video card, it just won't run memory at the speeds needed for that.

I've run some memory benchmarks with the latest Sandra and Everest Ultimate programs. Though not high tech definitive programs for performance stats, they can give a good general idea of what the B130 is doing. My first run on Sandra showed this high cache Celeron giving performance about equal to a Pentium M 715 model, a smaler cache and 400 MHz bus Pentium.

I'll post details if I see any significant improvement or degradation in performance running single stick 1GB memory or 1.25 GB with the loss of dual channel on both those configurations.

I wish there was a way I could get into the BIOS settings themselves for some minor tweaking, that can help a lot and have always done that with my desktops. Am trying to discover if there's a way to get into the BIOS settings themselves to see just what Dell has those set at.