How to best pump-up a midling notebook for gaming

[Nalayno]

Hello, new to this forum. I just purchased a notebook for $600 from Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215408&name=Laptops-Notebooks

It comes with 1x4GB of ram. I have a few questions about memory, excuse my inexperience. I'm on a budget and I was wondering whether I should purchase a matching stick of the stock 4GB of RAM or purchase an 8Gig high-performance Ram kit for this notebook? It appears this notebook's BIOS has no settings or ability to change ram settings so would getting high-performance ram for this notebook be a waste of money, or does the notebook know that it has high-performance RAM in it and runs it accordingly?

I'm not looking to do anything taxing with this notebook other than play SC2 and play Sim City Limited Edition when it comes out.

I was looking at RAM prices for an 8GB notebook RAM kit and it was below 40 bucks which is fairly cheap but would I be throwing away money when I could just buy 1 stick of the generic memory this notebook comes with for $15 or less, topping-out the ram at 8Gigs? Also, how big of a performance jump will you see by upgrading from 4 to 8Gigs of ram? I would hate to spend $40 bucks and not see any appreciable difference in gaming performance.

Advice is appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Automata]

Before you upgrade, you need to determine if a memory upgrade is even worth it. While running most of your applications, what is your memory usage, according to Task Manager? If you are less than 75-80%, it isn't worth upgrading because that extra memory won't be utilized.

The "best" upgrade for this laptop would like be a solid state drive. It comes stock with a very slow 5400rpm drive.

 

[Nalayno]

Before you upgrade, you need to determine if a memory upgrade is even worth it. While running most of your applications, what is your memory usage, according to Task Manager? If you are less than 75-80%, it isn't worth upgrading because that extra memory won't be utilized.

The "best" upgrade for this laptop would like be a solid state drive. It comes stock with a very slow 5400rpm drive.

thideras, I agree, I could use a SSD upgrade, I found a 64GB SSD for $60 that comes with a copy of True Image so that I could transfer my existing data to the SSD. I don't have a lot of data on this notebook and plan to use it exclusively as a cheap gaming notebook. Concerning the utilization of memory, I think upgrading to 8Gigs may be a good idea because the new Sim City Limited game is a memory hog, I'm sure it would run fine on 4Gigs but it might be snappier with 8, I'm not sure about that though. But the SSD suggestion sounds right, it's going to give me the best bang performance ratio. This notebook's 630M 2GB dedicated GPU is barely adequate but for under 100 bucks I can buy a cheap 8Gig ram kit and a SSD that should make this a very good bargain basement gaming notebook.

This notebook's BIOS is bare bones, it has little to no user changeable settings and certainly nothing for memory timings. Do you know if it is possible to change memory settings via software and bypass the BIOS?

Thank you for the response.

 

[Automata]

Almost all retail systems have locked down settings. Sometimes you can get programs that change the settings in Windows, but since the program runs after the operating system starts, it can only apply the settings there. Meaning, if you need to change the timings in order to get the system to POST and it doesn't auto detect them properly, it isn't going to work at all.

 

[Nalayno]

Almost all retail systems have locked down settings. Sometimes you can get programs that change the settings in Windows, but since the program runs after the operating system starts, it can only apply the settings there. Meaning, if you need to change the timings in order to get the system to POST and it doesn't auto detect them properly, it isn't going to work at all.

That's ok, upgrading to an SSD and 8GB of ram should be quite a bit better for gaming performance. I'm unsure whether this notebook's chipset supports Dual Channel Memory Mode but if it does than dropping in two sticks of identical memory should also net me a little more performance over just the single 4GB stick now. Thanks again, take care.