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What is faster?

E

evildragon

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May 29, 2007
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Even the slightest speed increase is important for what I'm going to do on this machine.

I want to upgrade one of my laptops, and Dell will offer me two types of upgrades.

1x 512MB
or
2x 256MB

So, what do I do? Both cost the same for me. I either have 1 512MB stick, or 2 256MB sticks.

512MB is the max for this laptop anyway.

EDIT: They are not DDR, they are plain PC100 SDRAM...
 
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if this were me, I'd get the two. Only reason is if another laptop were to come along that needed memory, you could get it running using one of the two and still have the other. You never know, in ten years... :)

Nathan
 
I would go for the 512MB, so you can upgrade to 1GB without tossing RAM. PC100 SODIMM are cheap anyway.
 
512MB is the max for this board anyway.

I just want the fastest speed possible, I will be doing a lot of compiling.
 
I have no evidence for which is faster but I would guess that 1 stick would be faster access time than relying on the bus to switch between two sticks. So if I can I go with one stick and make sure it's in slot 0 (first memory slot).

I'm not sure how eager your are to get the real fastest combo but you could always buy a 512 and a 256 and run a benchmark and then return the slower combo.

Then of course tell us what you find ;o)

- John
 
There will be no appreciable speed difference between the two configurations, assuming that the memory itself is the same speed in both configurations. The way SDRAM works, having multiple DIMMs does not increase latency. And in the PC100 era, there was no "dual channel" memory, so filling both slots won't make any bandwidth improvement.

Go with whatever's cheaper. (Or do like Druid suggests, and go with the 2x256 so that you have some amount of redundancy.)
 
PC100 and 512 RAM on a laptop? Thats not really a machine for compiling code o_O

I wanna see Gentoo run XD
 
I've never seem them like this. They are so shiny, they almost look like they need heatsinks, which Dell didn't put on them.

(yes, this is "Tiny" btw, Vlad. Dell honors the system now :D )
 
Vlad said:
They honor Tiny now?! \o/ By compile I assume you're going to attempt Linux again?
Click to expand...
Yep, since it generated a service tag, they have to now apparently, as the tag was "valid".

I'm going to do Solaris actually, it successfully boots on it.
 
Vlad said:
Wow, thats pretty cool. How well does that BIOS interact with it,or does it?
Click to expand...
It doesn't, as far as I know. Solaris just sees the system as a regular PC.

Oddly, before GRUB, the BIOS states: "Entering Compatibility Mode..." so there must be a way to force this, and Linux might work ok.

Though, in Solaris, battery support seems pretty bad, if it even has it at all. I have no battery indicator.
 
Solaris was never meant for a laptop, it was for workstations and machines all the way to big iron. (E25K) But a company called Tadpole does make "Mobile Workstations" (laptop with SPARC) so you might just have to find out how to add the battery meter. Sun Java Desktop or what ever they're calling it this week is just a hacked up version of Gnome, so its probably there somewhere...
 
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