8gb Ddr3 Sodimm

I'm thinking down the road (aug to sept) to insert a 2 x 4GB SODIMM kit DDR3 @ 1066MHz into my np8662. Corsair or Mushkin to do the job? I've heard both are great, but I want user input!

Jason

 

Pick the cheaper one.

 

They're both good and reliable brands, pretty much interchangeable in terms of reliability and performance. As Soviet Sunrise suggests, you should just buy whichever is cheaper at the time of purchase.

Out of curiosity, what will you be needing 8GB of memory for?

 

mushkin is $699 at newegg
corsair is $749 at newegg.

I've heard both are great brands, but I want to know other user opinions on these 2 companies. My old XPS m1710 had mushkin and I had no qualms, but I also heard corsair is "top of the heap" to many computer users. As for 8GB, I like to be able to be ready for larger programs and not have to resort to paging file as much, if at all.

 

RAM is RAM. As long as it works, it's RAM. There is no top, nor bottom, but RAM.

Such as?

 

If you know for sure you'll be taking advantage of that much memory, go for it, but if you aren't sure you'll be using that much, either stick with 4 GB or replace one stick at a time (going to 6 GB initially). I have a tough time running out of 3.5 GB (XP 32-bit) with no paging file even with multiple virtual machines running - you'll need some serious memory-using programs to justify 8 GB. Especially as prices will only come down (perhaps a bit slowly), going up in stages will make more economic sense if you don't need it all now.

I also agree that the cheaper brand is usually the better deal in memory, so long as it isn't no-name. Assuming they both have a warranty, of course, at this price - but if they've got a standard warranty, you'll be set. If a stick malfunctions 3 years from now it probably won't be $50 to replace it anyways.

 

Whatever comes around. If you've noticed, our OS's and applications have steadily become more RAM-hungry as time goes by. When XP came out in 2001, it wasn't uncommon for a computer to have 128MB or 256MB RAM, run XP and office apps swimmingly and you'd be done with it. Nowadays, it's not unheard of for our simple web-browsers to eat up 128MB on its own. Only the absolute budget PCs come with 2GB, standard seems to be 3 to 4GB and there are even a few "performance PCs" that are equipped with 6GB or more and are thus 64-bit exclusive. Look at MS Office. When it was existing in "early XP mode", you could get away with 256mb ram and xp so long as you weren't doing extensive number crunching, large databases or detail-laden powerpoints. Try doing that with Office 2007 and Vista / Win7 and you'll crash harder than a coke addict who just lost his pipe. I use OpenOffice, which isn't terrible in using RAM, but even its memory requirements from 1.0.1 to 3.1 have grown significantly.

Granted the Paging File is there to prevent this from happening, but it's a well-known fact that a rotating HDD is FAR slower than RAM itself, and the only RAM-Based SSDs (which can be as fast as RAM itself if given RAM with enough bandwidth and low-latency) are at minimum a 3.5" profile or a rack-based system, and the SSDs designed for a laptop are flash-based with "higher-than-HDD IOPS / read and writes but lower in random" performance. I want to know my performance is there on demand. Call me paranoid, but I'm the type of person who's always been more interested in being ready before the storm than having to rush about finding what I need during it.

 

None of the applications you mentioned eat up anywhere close to 4GB in total with the OS. In my opinion, buying a very expensive 8GB kit now is not a good decision unless you are immediately going to utilize it for applications on the professional and industrial level. By the time your applications begin to demand 8GB of RAM, in which I strongly doubt that will be anytime soon, your other components would also be pressured for an upgrade to keep up with current applications, in which you will be ending up buying a new machine because your M860TU is at the end of the line in terms of CPU and GPU platform.

4GB is plenty enough for the vast majority of users like you and me. I would wait for 8GB kits to drop in price before investing in them.

 

FWIW, Photoshop will eat RAM as fast as you can open large files for it.

 

yup. That's one program i had on my XPS that kept borking out even with 4GB RAM. Perhaps it doesn't help i would transfer negatives in at 4,000 dpi without compression from a Nikon F3HP camera. (Let's hear it for nikon coolscans!)

Jason

 

My god, man. That's an expensive camera, ganzonomy. How do the shots look at 4,000dpi?

 

the coolscan was $1200... it's a negative scanner and it scans at 4000 dpi. My Nikon F3HP is an early 90's film-based pro-level 35mm SLR that I found in a dumpster at work. (Works great too!)

 

at what time will the ddr3 4gb single dimms be @ an acceptable price? say in the rang eof 100-200 bucks

 

I don't know, why don't you ask the manufacturers?

 

well normally how long does it take

 

I'd give 4GB of DDR3 another year to get in that range.

 

wont be much use tho if the answer to that is never would it?