So for Christmas I am getting a laptop, mainly for school but I wanted it to be able to do some light gaming. I am mainly into older games such as the C&C series (except C&C 3) and Battlefield 2.
Anyway I am looking into upgrading the RAM on it. Currently it has 2GB of DDR2 667. I am not sure what brand it currently has in it and I can't open it because, like I mentioned, I am getting it for Christmas.
I noticed a few, pretty in-expensive RAM kits on Newegg and was wonder if you guys think it would be worth it to buy a kit or just leave the RAM thats in it.
Also, in case your wondering, I would probably just give the RAM to my friend who also has a 1720, as keeping the Dell installed RAM wouldn't make much sense in my opinion if I bought a kit.
I found a couple of RAM kits and the price differences are crazy for example:
G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) - $69.98 Newegg has the CAS Latency as 4 with timings listed as 4-4-4-12.
I found almost the exact same RAM for $52.98 The only difference is the cheaper RAM has worse timings. I can't find them right off but the CAS Latency is 5 and so I assume the timings are 5-5-5-15.
Other kits I was looking into are:
Kingston 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) - $50
and
Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) - $50 I can't find the timings for the Crucial or Kingston kits but the CAS Latency is 5 on both kits so I am assuming the timings are 5-5-5-15.
Would you recommend getting any of these or just keeping the RAM that it comes with?
With a laptop, I'd recommend keeping the RAM that comes with it. It's a really easy upgrade, but there's simply no real gain to be had by doing it. Dell don't exactly use top notch memory in their laptops, but it suffices, and if you run into any problems with the laptop later down the line, their warranty will be far more friendly on you if you haven't changed the memory.
That sounds like some good advice, I had heard that they didn't have the best RAM in them from factory so thats why I looked into upgrading.
With some of the better quality kits being decently priced I thought I would see what the forum thought on the subject before dropping $50+ on some new RAM.
Thanks for the feedback sammorris, I have seen a lot of your posts in threads similar to this one and it looks like you know what your talking about. :-)
It's up to you really, I've seen a Dell XPS M1710 with the same RAM in and it performs very well. The memory did have to be replaced under warranty though, so bear that in mind.
Thanks for the compliments... :)
