Thinkpads Forum

Anyone know where the best place to buy memory is? Newegg? I need to get 2 GB stick for a T60P.

i buy from newegg

Fry's recently has some good RAm sales.

I usually use dealram.com to comparision shop

Also, and sorry to thread hijack but I dont want to create a new thread for a newb question...But I searched around the forum and read my documentation and couldn't find the answer.

If I were to upgrade my ram in my T60p do both sticks need to be of the same capacity (1GBX2)? Or is it okay to mix and match with a 1GB and a 2GB stick?

foofightrs777 wrote:I usually use dealram.com to comparision shop

Also, and sorry to thread hijack but I dont want to create a new thread for a newb question...But I searched around the forum and read my documentation and couldn't find the answer.

If I were to upgrade my ram in my T60p do both sticks need to be of the same capacity (1GBX2)? Or is it okay to mix and match with a 1GB and a 2GB stick?

as long as it's the proper type of so-dimm ram for the t60p, then you could put a 2gb and 1gb with no problems. also, stating: the t60p doesn't recognize more than 3gb thanks to the current intel chipset.

if you put two of the same size (2x1gb), then you get a speed boost from dual channel

that's how i understand all this

Hmmm... does this mean you lose the dual channel speed boost if you put in 1x1GB and 1x2GB? Do you get it back if you put in 2x2GB even though Windows will only recognize 3GB? Or if you want the speed boost you MUST have 2x1GB?

I guess it's OK for the OP to hijack, innit?

Reading Intel's datasheet for the 945GM in the T60, to get top performance, you must populate both channels with the same size devices.

It's not clear whether Lenovo takes advantage of that and programs the device for symmetric mode if the devices match. I'd like to see benchmarks. Hey! I could do that at home. I (think I) have two 512MB sticks. Removing one will force asymmetric mode. Putting it back might allow symmetric mode.

What's a good memory bandwidth tester?

I'd like to see the result of your test. It will make a difference to my decision whether to upgrade memory or not. (So is not really thread hijack...

The difference is generally 5%, and this is mitigated by having 3Gb RAM which will offer more speed increases than that 5% boost.

Steve

steveh wrote:The difference is generally 5%, and this is mitigated by having 3Gb RAM which will offer more speed increases than that 5% boost.

That should be qualified with: If whatever your doing would take advantage of the extra GB of RAM. For most people, the notebook would boot slower (as a plain boot normally won't go above 1.5 GB of usage and until you start getting into memory intensive programs (or many apps at once) you wouldn't begin to appreciate the speed increase from more memory. (Yes, I have actually tested this on my desktop machine.)

As soon as you start a program that eats lots of RAM (such as photoshop, some games, etc) or a program that would benifit from tons of cache memory (such as a SQL server or other applications that do random access to multi-gigabyte disk files) the increase in RAM would offer a greater benifit than the faster RAM access.

Also, most chipsets (and I'm not sure about the intel 945) will slow memory access timings if there are larger chips in place. This is the type of slow down that, normally, would only show up in very memory intensive operations (such as memory benchmarks, audio/video encoding/decoding, etc.)

General rule of thumb I've used in my desktop builds is: If the machine is swapping out to the page file for normal operations, consider upgrading the RAM. (This can be annoying to figure out as WinXP and winVista both will swap certain things to the page file no matter how much ram you have in order to make more room for caching.)