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Is a 2+2 GB More Efficient than a single 4GB Card

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Last response: July 30, 2012 3:57 AM in Memory

July 22, 2012 1:21:39 PM

Hi,

I'm Purchasing a Sony Vaio Laptop. It is coming with a default 2GB RAM card. I want to Make 4GB.

Is a 2+2 Ram Much Faster and More efficient than a single 4GB card,

or Shall i go for a Single 4GB card so that i can have one slot free for future extension?

Please Advice......'

Thanks in Advance....

More about : efficient single 4gb card

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jaquith

Memory Master

July 22, 2012 1:31:46 PM

Assuming the Sony Vaio Laptop is Dual Channel and DDR3 RAM then the differences are negligible. RAM is cheap now so if you think you'll use 8GB then it's best to buy a matched set of 2x4GB.

On a side note, if you use Hibernation then both waking and 'sleeping' (Hybrid or Hibernation) will take longer as the amount of RAM increases.

OS limits - anything >4GB of RAM requires a 64-bit OS; see - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop...(v=vs.85).aspx

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Sridhar Nag S

July 28, 2012 4:39:23 AM

mine is windows 7 and the ram is ddr3. then the differences as you said will be negligible. then i will go for a 4 gb ram card.

but what if the ram is ddr1 or ddr2, i mean a slower version of ram. then will a 2x2gb will be faster or a 1X4gb be faster

please advice, and thanks a lot for your reply.....

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Best solution

jaquith

Memory Master

July 28, 2012 1:26:29 PM

In DDR1 and DDR2 the differences are still small but show up in benchmarks whereas DDR3 only synthetic benchmarks.

In any case to a point more RAM is 'better' but only if there's no 'FREE' memory listed. Once 'FREE' memory is exhausted then the memory management begins to take 'Shared' memory which in turn can slow other functions from their optimized state. Also, there's Applications e.g. Rendering including Photos & Videos which do better with large amount of RAM.

So it depends on the OS, Applications, and Project Size as to how much RAM is recommended or need to run in its optimized state.

As a general rule my minimum recommendations for Windows XP = 2GB, Windows 7 & 8 = 4GB and double that for ideal minimums and Adobe & Rendering 16GB+.