so, I opened up my old pc, and I removed the 4 gb sticks of ram (there were 2). and I'm wondering if I inserted one of those into my new laptop, which is running an intel i5, will perform any better with an added 4gb of ram. will battlefield 4 and hardline run better? will trainz run high graphics without a fuss? so many questions...
question about ram
- Thread starter ktain.ny
- Start date
shaneturner12
Tutorial Creator
The graphics side will also depend on the graphics card from memory. It may also be worth checking the memory speed as that can have an effect.
Shane
Shane
johnwhelan
Well-known member
It definitely won't work. You need RAM specifically made for laptops or similar machines.
Laptops use SO-DIMMS, which are compact and much, much smaller than the desktop DIMMs and besides the pin-outs are different and they wouldn't fit.
That said adding more or RAM to the laptop will surely help your games. You won't see the affects of a faster or better video card which you can't usually do in a laptop, but the additional RAM will relieve the pressure on the system overall as it seeks out resources to run your programs.
With this in mind, you need to find DIMMs that exceed the size you already have. You currently have 8 GB installed. If you were to install 2 x 8 GB DIMMS giving you 16 GB that's a good deal. Just remember you need to match the speed, refresh rate, and other specs required by your machine to ensure you have purchased the proper RAM. Putting in slower RAM will cause the system to operate worse even with more memory, and having RAM that more than exceeds the speed may not be of any benefit and a waste of money.
I recommend going to the manufacturer's website and looking at the specs and upgrades available for the machine. You don't need to purchase the RAM directly from them, especially if the price is much higher than the market, but instead use this resource to determine what you need to make your machine run better.
Hope this helps.
Laptops use SO-DIMMS, which are compact and much, much smaller than the desktop DIMMs and besides the pin-outs are different and they wouldn't fit.
That said adding more or RAM to the laptop will surely help your games. You won't see the affects of a faster or better video card which you can't usually do in a laptop, but the additional RAM will relieve the pressure on the system overall as it seeks out resources to run your programs.
With this in mind, you need to find DIMMs that exceed the size you already have. You currently have 8 GB installed. If you were to install 2 x 8 GB DIMMS giving you 16 GB that's a good deal. Just remember you need to match the speed, refresh rate, and other specs required by your machine to ensure you have purchased the proper RAM. Putting in slower RAM will cause the system to operate worse even with more memory, and having RAM that more than exceeds the speed may not be of any benefit and a waste of money.
I recommend going to the manufacturer's website and looking at the specs and upgrades available for the machine. You don't need to purchase the RAM directly from them, especially if the price is much higher than the market, but instead use this resource to determine what you need to make your machine run better.
Hope this helps.
Does it still work?
To my knowledge, memory bars always need to be in pairs, so just one wont work.
steamboateng
New member
John is right on when it comes to matching ram spec's to your machine. Clock speed and latency are important factors. Your Google finger should be exercised liberally in that respect. Knowing how to match memory is technical, but not really a great mystery.
johnwhelan
Well-known member
Translation go to crucial.com and use their scanner. Other ram manufacturers such as kingston also have look up tables but I've been very pleased with the crucial memory but it can be 5 cents more from tteir site.
Cheerio John
Extra RAM only helps if you are running many programs at the same time. Easiest way to check is to start up your preferred programs and also fire up task manager and look at memory usage. If it's full then you may need extra RAM.
If you run out of RAM for a program's needs then the operating system will swap out the contents of some of the used RAM to your hard disk. The problem is that when that program needs that RAM again, it has to be reloaded from your hard disk and some other program's ram swapped out. You can guess what that will do to performance.
Whenever I tossed out an old PC or laptop, I used to keep the RAM chips just in case I could use them. I never have.
If you are running short of memory try shutting down those programs you really don't need running such as browsers, e-mail, news feeds and all that other rubbish that Microsoft thinks we need to know about.
If you run out of RAM for a program's needs then the operating system will swap out the contents of some of the used RAM to your hard disk. The problem is that when that program needs that RAM again, it has to be reloaded from your hard disk and some other program's ram swapped out. You can guess what that will do to performance.
Whenever I tossed out an old PC or laptop, I used to keep the RAM chips just in case I could use them. I never have.
If you are running short of memory try shutting down those programs you really don't need running such as browsers, e-mail, news feeds and all that other rubbish that Microsoft thinks we need to know about.
Extra ram specific to the laptop capabilities could also be beneficial if your video card is also running with shared ram, increasing the system ram might also allow you to allocate more ram to the running of the onboard GPU, giving a second benefit. This is not true if you have a GPU chipset that already has dedicated ram, only if you have shared ram for the GPU.