Thinkpads Forum

The issue is not Crucial's modules running at 667MHz, it is with the chipset's memory controller reliably operating dual 2GB modules at 667MHz.

So when one of us plugs two 2Gb 667Mhz modules into a T60, how can we tell what speed they're running at? To see if in fact the chipset clocks down to 533Mhz? Thanks.

donking! wrote:So when one of us plugs two 2Gb 667Mhz modules into a T60, how can we tell what speed they're running at? To see if in fact the chipset clocks down to 533Mhz? Thanks.

It should tell you in the BIOS what the RAM amount and speed are...at least it does on my dell...

Holy cow what a price increase. Now at US $1499.99

do you realize how little 4 gigs will help you over 1 gig? The point of ram is easy and fast access. XP stores commonly used or recently used files inside the ram and when it uses it again it pulls it back out, kind of like you put a piece of paper on the top of your desk if you need it again soon instead of filling it away in a cabinet. Now lets say you have 4 gigs it has to look through all 4 gigs of information which takes longer its all a balance. Just like before if you have too many sheets of paper on your desk its still going to take time to find something you need. Its still better but the % of improvement is very very little. 2 gigs should be as much as you need and thats even overdoing it. 1 gig is about the limit for reasonable improvement. Im just making these numbers up but 256 mbs to 512mbs would be like a 40% increase 512 to 768 would be like 30% better then 1 gig would be like 20% and so on. Those are just to show you what I mean but its probably not that drastic.

SmokeyRobinson5 wrote:do you realize how little 4 gigs will help you over 1 gig? The point of ram is easy and fast access. XP stores commonly used or recently used files inside the ram and when it uses it again it pulls it back out, kind of like you put a piece of paper on the top of your desk if you need it again soon instead of filling it away in a cabinet. Now lets say you have 4 gigs it has to look through all 4 gigs of information which takes longer its all a balance.

[...]

Except, it's more like getting a bigger desk than just having more pieces of paper on the desk. What if you're running a task that needs more than 1 GB of memory (more papers than what would fit on the desk)? Would you rather it swap (keep having to get up to use the shelf)?

Analogies are fun.

It also has a lot to do with running processes though not just accessing files, more processes use more ram, less ram; windows is going to start using virtual memory, slowing things way down.

Your also missing the biggest point, speed. RAM is much faster.

I realize that 4Gb compared to 2Gb for most purposes is overkill. But I plan to use this machine mainly for working in Photoshop. And Photoshop is criminal number one, when it comes to RAM hogging.

I also want to be able to do quite a bit of multi-tasking at the same time. Run Photoshop, Indesign, Firefox, MS-Word, Irfanview, and some other smaller applications at the same time.

And I may do some Video editing, with all those resource heavy realtime video rendering tasks.

So in my case, I think the memory will make a significant difference. Though in other situations I realize it probably wouldn't be worth it.

well if you want to see for yourself look up some benchmarks and find how little the differences are. What im trying to say is its not the holy grail of computer speed.

SmokeyRobinson5 wrote:well if you want to see for yourself look up some benchmarks and find how little the differences are. What im trying to say is its not the holy grail of computer speed.

Benchmarks of what? Suppose you're running a task that genuinely needs more than 1 GB of memory, would you rather the computer begin to crawl trashing your swap rather than working on the task?

Stuff like large file editing, numerical computation etc. can easily spiral out of control in terms of size---even if not in terms of computational difficulty. If you know you're going to run something that needs it, you have no reasons not to upgrade your memory. Just because most normal, well behaved tasks won't see an iota of difference between 4 GB and 1 GB doesn't mean 4 GB is useless.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/13/ ... page5.html
didnt have time to look this up last time but what it says is basically 2 gbs is what you need for just about anything. Read the whole article if you want those are just some popular benchmarks. You can still get 4 gigs if you want but im just warning that the average person wont need 4 gigs for a while but i dont know what you do.

(edit) that also has benchmarks with 3ds max7 in case you need to see that...
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/13/ ... page9.html
oh yeah and this is the first page...
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/13/ ... index.html

SmokeyRobinson5 wrote:that also has benchmarks with 3ds max7 in case you need to see that...
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/13/ ... page9.html

I understand what you and they are saying, but they also don't clearly articulate what it is they're doing in 3DSMax, apart from saying it's "CPU intensive", do they?

All I am saying is, if you want to work with a model whose data itself takes more than 512 MB (from their bar chart) to hold in memory, what choice do you have but to going in for more memory?

Personally, I am a computational scientist (fancy name for a poor soul in grad school), and I routinely come across situations of this nature. So I ordered my computer with 2 GB of memory. If that isn't sufficient, I will upgrade in the future, or just move the computations over to larger machines, or clusters.

2 gigs is fine what im trying to say is you should wait till you need something before you upgrade to it. The price for the 2 gig stick is way too much and if you wait till you need it which wont be for a while the price will have fallen drastically. From what ive seen that is the only 2 gigabyte stick of sodimm memory (laptop memory) and thats why it costs like 1500 dollars. So what im saying is wait till you need it before you buy it. Also if you are really into multi-tasking the new T60s already have intel core duos so that should provide enough multi-tasking for anyone especially if its paired with 2 gigs of ram.

SmokeyRobinson5 wrote:Now lets say you have 4 gigs it has to look through all 4 gigs of information which takes longer its all a balance.

This part is not at all correct. The time to access an information in RAM is mostly independent of the RAM's size. But I do agree with you to say that it follows the rule of diminishing returns. As you keep adding and adding RAM, the percentage improvement decreases. But somebody may need a large amount of RAM for some special applications.

I can end the whole "do you really need 3GB or 4GB RAM with XP" argument in a single word: VMWare.

When doing some serious virtualization for testing and you need to run multiple VMs on a laptop, 3 or 4GB RAM is wonderful!

SmokeyRobinson5 wrote:2 gigs is fine what im trying to say is you should wait till you need something before you upgrade to it.

Isn't that what everyone else is already saying anyway? That there are certain specialized uses for which more than 2Gb is useful? Where's the disagreement? I just don't see what's so controversial about that claim. No one is arguing that most people probably don't need more than 2Gb and that they may well not even need that much.

*

Further, I don't think the Tom's Hardware article proves at all that no one needs more than 2Gb RAM, as SmokeyRobinson5 claims.

SmokeyRobinson5 wrote:it says basically 2 gbs is what you need for just about anything

In fact, the article concludes:

"If you intend to do heavy multitasking, especially if you have more than one CPU or CPU core. Running RAM intensive games such as World of Warcraft, downloading files via high speed FTP or encrypted protocols, Bittorrent or any P2P program; decompressing large archives and playing large size video files in a window or on second monitor all at the same time can max out your system memory pretty fast - if your CPU can handle it."

So the article offers a circumstance in which you "can max out your system memory pretty fast." And it clearly envisions the possibility of faster CPUs (with multiple cores) requiring more memory (exactly the sort of case potentially arising with a T60).

Also, the Tom's Hardware article only tests up to 2Gb. So there's no comparative information there on what 4Gb would do (especially in the sort of multi-tasking scenario they outline). In fact, the article doesn't even fully test the sort of multi-tasking scenario it imagines. Also the article does not test any of the specialized computational, virtualization, photo editing, and video editing scenarios that people here are claiming will benefit from more than 2Gb. So the Tom's Hardware article really doesn't speak to our claims.

donking! wrote:

SmokeyRobinson5 wrote:2 gigs is fine what im trying to say is you should wait till you need something before you upgrade to it.

Isn't that what everyone else is already saying anyway? That there are certain specialized uses for which more than 2Gb is useful? Where's the disagreement? I just don't see what's so controversial about that claim. No one is arguing that most people probably don't need more than 2Gb and that they may well not even need that much.

*

Further, I don't think the Tom's Hardware article proves at all that no one needs more than 2Gb RAM, as SmokeyRobinson5 claims.

SmokeyRobinson5 wrote:it says basically 2 gbs is what you need for just about anything

In fact, the article concludes:

"If you intend to do heavy multitasking, especially if you have more than one CPU or CPU core. Running RAM intensive games such as World of Warcraft, downloading files via high speed FTP or encrypted protocols, Bittorrent or any P2P program; decompressing large archives and playing large size video files in a window or on second monitor all at the same time can max out your system memory pretty fast - if your CPU can handle it."

So the article offers a circumstance in which you "can max out your system memory pretty fast." And it clearly envisions the possibility of faster CPUs (with multiple cores) requiring more memory (exactly the sort of case potentially arising with a T60).

Also, the article only tests up to 2Gb. So there's no comparative information there on what 4Gb would do (especially in the sort of multi-tasking scenario they outline). In fact, the article doesn't even fully test the sort of multi-tasking scenario it imagines. Also the article does not test any of the specialized computational, virtualization, photo editing, and video editing scenarios that people here are claiming will benefit from more than 2Gb. So the Tom's Hardware article really doesn't speak to our claims.

Really, the more RAM you have, the better; but looking at it more carefully, you discovere that the benefit per unit increase of RAM per cost drops off quickly after 2 GB or even 1.5-1 GB of RAM; it all depends on what you want to do. Downloading, and all the rest of daily activities are adaptive; they use how ever much is there to get the job done quickly, it is the job of the OS to monitor and control how many resources such programs use.

Would I benefit from 4GB of RAM? Of course; Would I pay for 4GB of RAM? Most likely not since, if I can get by with 2GB of RAM, I will be happy...Unless I have some future reason that requires more RAM.

The Tom's Hardware article doesn't prove anything either way; it isn't as if you will exceed a threshold that all programs will stop at and have left over 2GB if all the programs used up the other 2GB; If they could and if the OS supported it, they would spread out and take up as much as they felt like, OS permitting of course. It probably wouldn't make much of a difference to the normal user for the amount of money spent.

christopher_wolf wrote:looking at it more carefully, you discovere that the benefit per unit increase of RAM per cost drops off quickly after 2 GB or even 1.5-1 GB of RAM

I generally agree with your points about cost versus usefulness and that it's all a personal judgment call.

But I think it's hard to say the "benefit per unit increase of RAM per cost" drops off in any linear way at a certain amount of memory (e.g. 1.5 to 2 Gb). This may be be a good general rule for most people. But again, it all depends on the specific use and requirements. That is, the "benefit" is not some fixed thing. It depends on the particular user. So it's hard to fully generalize the point. For some uses, the benefit won't drop off at 2Gb. For others, it will drop off at 1Gb or even sooner.

And of course the "cost" is relative also. It's relative to one's resources and to other costs that any loss of time (from a slower computer) would incur.

I am willing to bet you get almost no increase in performance doing ANYTHING (within reason: no calculating pi on a supercomputer) on your computer with 4 gigs over 2 gigs at the moment.
Also more is not always better because 4 gigs can be slower than 1 gig as proven time and time again in pcmarks05 and 3dmarks05. If you look at the top scoring computers ever they almost all have 1 gig (not even 2 gigs) of ram and until windows can use more ram more efficiently and your computer can communicate with the ram faster it will most likely be the same. More does not always equal better and its extremely possible that 4 gigs is better in some forms but I have yet to find any benchmarks or solid proof backing a large percentage gain in performance. If anyone has anything that prooves me wrong then show it to me and I will change my mind.

SmokeyRobinson5 wrote:I am willing to bet you get almost no increase in performance doing ANYTHING (within reason: no calculating pi on a supercomputer) on your computer with 4 gigs over 2 gigs at the moment.
Also more is not always better because 4 gigs can be slower than 1 gig as proven time and time again in pcmarks05 and 3dmarks05. If you look at the top scoring computers ever they almost all have 1 gig (not even 2 gigs) of ram and until windows can use more ram more efficiently and your computer can communicate with the ram faster it will most likely be the same. More does not always equal better and its extremely possible that 4 gigs is better in some forms but I have yet to find any benchmarks or solid proof backing a large percentage gain in performance. If anyone has anything that prooves me wrong then show it to me and I will change my mind.

Agree with most of what you're saying, but some of us don't run Windows.