Good, inexpensive RAM

I am planning on purchasing a W520 soon and I was wondering what sort of RAM would be good for cheaply getting to 16GB. There's a lot of talk about the HyperX "Plug and Play" RAM around here, but that's in the triple-digit range and I'm not looking to put that much money in RAM. Newegg had a sale for $55 for 2x4GB, though that appears to be gone... Any suggestions?

 

Just get a good brand name RAM. Personally I have used the 8 GB Crucial 1333 RAM in my E6410, for like 65 dollars.

 

Most RAM does the job just fine, does not make too much of a difference.

 

I suggest the any ram that's on sale at newegg.

 

does your W520 came with quad core or dual core? The former uses 4 ram slots and the latter have only 2.

 

I'm using 3 sticks of:
Newegg.com - G.SKILL 4GB 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Laptop Memory Model F3-10600CL9S-4GBSQ

My factory original single 4GB Dimm is from Samsung, but everyone seems to be playing together nicely for a total of 16GB!

 

Awesome! I was searching Newegg a few days ago and this was all I could find for cheap memory, pushing my upgrade budget too high (I'm also planning on getting a 80GB mSATA SSD). You've just saved me enough money for a nice lunch with my girlfriend .

 

I thought all RAMs were good and inexpensive?

 

Well, when I begun my search, I found a 2x4GB kit for $55 after rebate thanks to NBR, but apparently that ran dry. I was only looking at the kits, which were ~$80-89, and I was trying to find one cheaper. Apparently, I'd save money by buying the 4GB DIMMs one by one, as in the link above my last post here.

 

ha ha - cool!

I should mention that I just received my W520 yesterday: I installed the extra ram, an Intel 310 and a second SSD (replacing my HDD that came with the system). it's all pretty easy if you follow the instructions in the hardware manual. The only kind of tricky thing was moving the keyboard, just because you're worried about damaging it - however, this also turned out to be a non-issue and was pretty straightforward.

have fun - now that i have it up and running (seemingly properly!) it's a pretty awesome system. You will be stoked!

 

I've heard about having to remove the keyboard, but judging from reviews ive seen it shouldnt be that hard. im planning on getting a 500GB hard drive stock from lenovo since the $40 upgrade costs less than buying an aftermarket 500GB hard drive; planning on keeping it for data storage, and moving the OS/programs to the mSATA. my current C:\ partition is full and it's ~50GB, so there goes my idea of getting a 40GB mSATA haha.

I've browsed through lenovoservicetraining.com and they have some awesome how-to's and videos on the site. That, and thanks to the lighter weight and all the other cool features of the Thinkpad, I've decided to go with the W520 over the M4600. All I have to do now is to wait for my college fund to be given to me (I'm not 18 until the 20th). Six or seven days until I call up Lenovo... =)

 

I installed 4 of these: Newegg.com - Patriot Signature 4GB 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Laptop Memory Model PSD34G13332S

Working fine so far and no problems in Memtest86 either. Windows Experience Index subscore for Memory was 5.9 before the upgrade, jumped up to 7.6 afterwards.