Please help with upgrade decision on notebook

pappadj

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Jan 20, 2004
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I have a Gateway 7410GX notebook with 512MB Corsair XMS 3200LL memory. I'm thinking of another chip of the same allowing me to keep my timings, CAS and maybe dual channel if this thing supports it (don't think it does though). But the problem is that ecost is the only place I can find it and it's $117!! I could buy the 1GB Corsair VS 3200 chip for $30 less but this will revert the system to CAS 3 and bump up timings a little.

The intensive things I want to do with this laptop is play WOW which plays well right now but I will always have the 64MB video bottleneck and video editing. I'm going to get a 7200rpm Hitachi drive and XP Pro x64 and when the M2 cpus come out, I will turn the laptop into a HTPC with a decent tuner card. So I basically need to get another year out of this thing if possible.

Any suggestions here? Thanks for the help!


 
Feb 24, 2001
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More ram is usually better than faster ram, especially at the lower levels (512MB or so). I doubt you'd even notice a decrease in going from 512MB CAS 2 to CAS 3.
 

pappadj

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Jan 20, 2004
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Thanks Bruno.. I think I will likely go with the 1GB stick and maybe later pair it with another 1GB stick if I reallly need that. The Cas change from 2.5 to 3.0 may not be that huge but the Dual Channel may be slightly significant... add on the stricter timings and I feel that I may notice a difference. But I'm with you here... should I care that much?

Any other observations?
 

pappadj

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Jan 20, 2004
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Just noticed... the VS is cas 2.5 also. Pretty nice. So now all I loose is timings and the possibility of doing Dual Channel

I think I'm good for this now. I just hope there's no incompatibility issues with the notebook mobo. If it becomes an issue then I'll just go to plan C... yank the 512 and sell it and buy another 1GB. =D

Thanks again