Thinkpads Forum

Hey, might have the opportunity to update a x61s to a x200s. One of the things I did with the 'older' thinkpad was updated RAM to 8G. I've found DDR3 4G sticks, but wondering if anyone in this forum had tried it yet.

As far as I know all the Thinkpad models do. If it didn't it would be the odd one out.

I'm running 8G in my x200s, no problems. Makes for great use of VMs - I have OSX and Ubuntu running in VMs within Vista at any given time and none of them swap to disk with any frequency.

raiaken wrote:I'm running 8G in my x200s, no problems. Makes for great use of VMs - I have OSX and Ubuntu running in VMs within Vista at any given time and none of them swap to disk with any frequency.

What brand for ram are you running and what was the cost?

When you have 8GB of RAM installed, under system properties, how much of that 8GB RAM is listed as available?

I am just curious, when reading Lenovo's website, it says the x200/x200s only supports a max of 4GB of RAM.

There are several reasons Lenovo would list it as only supporting a maximum of 4gb of RAM, but this is not a hardware imposed limit. If the motherboard didn't support 8gb of RAM it wouldn't even boot with the modules installed.

Windows will show the 8gb of installed RAM.

visionviper wrote:There are several reasons Lenovo would list it as only supporting a maximum of 4gb of RAM

Really? such as? It doesn't make sense

mbaha wrote:Really? such as? It doesn't make sense

They probably offer 4gb as the highest amount of memory they would install on the laptop. Some manufacturers will only list configurations they directly offer to the consumer - that way they aren't making promises about certain hardware support.

It makes perfect sense really. It's kind of the same reasons RAID hardware manufacturers will publish list detailing supported hardware. That way if you call them up and go "Hey, it's not working on this system" they can go "well, it isn't on our supported hardware list". Sure, any good company will still do their best to help you but you can't blame them when you use it with hardware they don't officially list as supported.

It's also common for manufacturers to list the maximum RAM capacity based on the modules that are available at the time the system is released and then never update the system description when higher-capacity modules come out.

What 4GB modules are you using?

mbaha wrote: What brand for ram are you running and what was the cost?

Generic with Samsung chips. I bought them a few months ago from a wholesaler on ebay for something like $500 after bing.com cashback discount.

furrycute wrote:When you have 8GB of RAM installed, under system properties, how much of that 8GB RAM is listed as available?

I am just curious, when reading Lenovo's website, it says the x200/x200s only supports a max of 4GB of RAM.

It shows 8GB, as it should.

I can verify that 8GB of RAM will work in the x200s. The biggest problem is determining what brands will work. Fortunately I have a good retailer (NCIX) who lets me return items for incompatibility.

My first purchase was Corsair CM3X8GSDKIT1066. This set refused to POST. BIOS beep codes indicating memory or system board error. I tried the memory in a Thinkpad T410 and it worked so the memory wasn't defective.

I exchanged the Corsair for Mushkin 97664A which work fine. Strangely these are labeled as "Apple memory" on the packaging but they work fine in my x200s.

Why do some brands work and not others? I'm not sure. Both the Corsair and Mushkin modules are rated CL-7-7-7-20 at 1.5 volts. Unfortunately I didn't notice what brand of chips are on the Corsair modules. I can verify that both the original 2GB modules from Lenovo and the Mushkin 4GB modules use Micron chips.

8GB of RAM should work in x200s, but you have to use 64bit windows