What would you choose?

[pppttl]

Hey everyone!

 

 

Last October I bought my Lenovo G50-70 for my studies at the university. I knew from the beginning that the 4gigs of RAM will not be enough for me in the long term, but I bought it anyway, saying I might upgrade it later. The day has come!

 

To be exact, the specs are (actually, my GPU does not overheat, so there is some bug):

 

 

 

 

I wanted to dig into this topic before I buy a kit or a stick, and now I am particularly confused. In theory I bought this laptop with an 1600 MHz DDR3 4 stick.

 

My first question would be, that why does CPU-Z and Speccy show 800 MHz? I may attach a picture:

....and it says that I have 4 memory slots, but I only have 2. Why?

 

 

 

Details about my current RAM:

 

My second question is, what would you choose?

• Buying an 8 GB stick (probably resulting in single channel mode, and 800 Mhz, in total of 12GB)
• Buying this kit (1600 Mhz, dual channel, but only 8Gbs)
• Other option (please comment)

At the moment I am not sure if the 12 GB option is better or worse, that is why I ask you. I shall mention that my RAM usage with this current setup (4GB) goes arround 80-85% when multitasking).

 

Thanks in advance for your help!

Ps.: sorry for my english, I am hungarian. I will send more pictures of the specs if you want, so feel free to ask for them.

 

 

URLs:

http://imgur.com/a/lRX1D

http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-HyperX-Impact-1600MHz-HX316LS9IBK2/dp/B00KQCU3WM?

[pppttl]

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[ArcticDolphin]

It really depends. If you plan on upgrading down the line I would go with one stick. If not then the kit.

[AlwaysFSX]

It shows 800MHz because of Double Data Rate stuff, double that and you have your RAM speed.

[pppttl]

It shows 800MHz because of Double Data Rate stuff, double that and you have your RAM speed.

 

Does single channel mode has any noticeable disadvantages compared to dual channel?

[AlwaysFSX]

Does single channel mode has any noticeable disadvantages compared to dual channel?

Can't access two sticks at once but you won't really notice a difference to be honest.

[Anthony10]

This is why you don't get an AMD GPU

/s

 

Well according to a little research, I found this forum thread that supports @AlwaysFSX's comment, it is actually running 1600mhz because DDR ram.

 

So I think your question would be different now? Or your question is answered..

[FatPenguin]

the faster 8gb kit is the best. the slow 8gb DIMM would not perform nearly as well

[FruitBasketSilex]

Dat 511° doe

[ApolloX75]

All DDR is a 2x multiplier. Hence the Double. So you take its base clock and multiply by two to get the actual speed. DDR400 is 2x200MHz, DDR3 1333MHz is 2x667MHz and so on.

The 3 in DDR3 just specifies generation. SDR (Single Data Rate) maxed out at 133MHz and never went past that thanks to DDR.

There is also RDRAM but I'm not getting into that here.

So by all means @pppttl get the 8gb DDR3 1600 kit. You won't regret it.