Ain't that just RAMtastic...

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I've been looking into the question of upgrading the memory on one or two of my machines, and bought a cheap (£10) secondhand DDR3 1600 MHz 4 GB RAM stick to go with the Samsung module already installed. I wasn't expecting miracles, but the laptop immediately recognized the extra RAM as usable, without any need for messing around in the BIOS or MS Config (which I was not looking forward to), and has been running perfectly ever since. The RAM sticks are very closely matched, but have one or two divergencies (and are from different manufacturers):




In particular the '# of Ranks' and ' # Row of Addressing Bits' specifications differ. Hopefully this is not significant, but does anyone know whether it could affect some aspect of performance?

I'm also interested in the more general issue of speed. The official specs of this machine (Toshiba Satellite C850D 11Q) mention only PC3 8500 DDR3 1066 MHz RAM, but mine now has 1600 MHz RAM and seems to run fine. Crucial's RAM upgrade kits for this machine come with 1600 Mhz and also 1833 MHz RAM, but 'Mr Memory' has a 1066 MHz kit. Another laptop I own also has installed RAM with a different speed to that specified by the manufacturer. Is it a fair bet that 1600MHz RAM (which seems to be readily available) will work with most machines, regardless of official specs, or was I just lucky this time? I don't think I've actually ever seen a 1066 MHz RAM stick by the way.

Zoom device required to read that list above, I think.

Well I haven't got a blooming clue what you're on about but you seem happy about it so well done.

As long as you have the same kind of RAM (which is DDR3) you should be fine. The MHz is just for speed of the memory you have installed. I don't know if it affects performance with different speeds of the memory but just adding more is enough of a speed boost.

It doesn't matter what frequency your RAM is as long as it it the same form factor and the same type. You have the correct RAM as if you didn't the computer would fail to boot.

It certainly does affect performance what frequency you use but given that you don't know what type of RAM you have I don't think you need to worry about that. Given that you're using a laptop I doubt you're doing any sort of heavy computing tasks that would benefit substantially from using DDR3 at higher frequencies or capacities.

There is always RAM in the thicket, the Lord will provide.

Genesis 22

RAM is always automatically configured with the default settings by the BIOS. Once configured the
BIOS unpacks itself to the RAM, then jumps to the memory location in RAM where it has unpacked to resume
execution of the BIOS code. Rarely do you need to touch the settings in the BIOS and you certainly would not need to configure it at the OS level.



The machine is sold with PC3-8500 (DDR3 1066) but the manual says that it can be upgraded to
DDR3-1333 or 1600