Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[Pemalite]

JEMC said:
@eFKac: I don't know much about laptops, but when pairing RAM sticks, the usual things to look at are the speed and latency (meaning that both sticks "should" be 1600MHz and CL11 or whatever are the values of your current RAM).

That or simply go and get a single stick with 8GB of RAM .

And I would go for quantity over speed, 8GB 1333MHz better than 4GB 1866MHz.

Depends.
If a graphics card is taking memory from system memory, than latency be damned, frequency is what you want.

His laptop uses nVidia Optimus (Lord help you, that you never have driver issues!) thus it's easy to assume the Geforce 740M has it's own memory pool.

However, according to the Intel specifications sheet the notebook won't support memory speed faster than 1600mhz, so whatever Ram you buy that exceeds that, will probably drop to 1600mhz.

I suggest just a 2x4Gb 1600mhz kit. - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231482
Or getting a single 4Gb stick that matches the other in terms of speed. (I.E. If the other one is 1333mhz it makes ZERO sense to go with a 1600Mhz stick because you generally pay more for those.)

eFKac said:

So here comes the question. I have a spare memory slot, I want to upgrade my RAM. I couldn't find another same stick as mine. What should I look at so the new stick would be paired and working perfectly? Motherboard compatibility, frequency, timings, voltage, manufacturer? What is important what is not? Is it OK to combine 4 + 2 gig sticks (I assume yes) cause I think 6GBs would close the deal.
Or would it be better if I sold my current stick and get a better 4GBs one like for example with an CL9 instead of a CL11 at 1600 MHz frequency, would I see a difference in game performance with better timings?

The less specialized language you use the better appriciate all the help!

Mixing different brands, frequency, latency Ram isn't that much of a drama these days, it used to be with some specific chipsets, but these days the fastest Ram stick will just match all it's settings to the slowest Ram stick.

As for going towards 6Gb, I don't advise it, going with 4Gb+2Gb would enable Aysnchronous Dual Channel DDR mode, so performance wouldn't be optimal, go for a matching size pair.
You can also download and run CPU-Z to determine what frequency your current Ram runs at and buy another stick that matches it.