I have an alienware MX15 Laptop it currently is running windows 7 64bit Home Premium Edition. PC3-10600S-9-10-F2.1333 will this ram work in it. I have a I7 processor and im wondering if the 4gigs of ram is the reason that any game i play appears to run in slow motion ... wondering if i should just upgrade to 8gig or go for broke for 16.... any ideas?

Question

I have an alienware MX15 Laptop it currently is running windows 7 64bit Home Premium Edition.  PC3-10600S-9-10-F2.1333  will this ram work in it. I have a I7 processor and im wondering if the 4gigs of ram is the reason that any game i play appears to run in slow motion ... wondering if i should just upgrade to 8gig or go for broke for 16.... any ideas?

Accepted Answer

I have no idea if the games you play on that laptop benefit from additional RAM, however in general, 64-bit OS and 4G of RAM is a bad combination -- you get the performance penalty of 64-bit pointers but not the benefit of having more than 4G of RAM that require 64-bit addressing. Of course, with Windows you now don't get much of a choice because some software is only released for 64-bit system.

It may be an overkill to install 16G of RAM but just as well it may be not -- as I said, I have no idea about your requirements, and it is possible that graphics card performance and CPU power management are more important factors there. To be honest, I do not understand the idea of "gaming laptop" because laptops are designed to be small, light and power-efficient, all those play against the performance. Well, Alienware MX15 is not exactly small, but it's smaller than a desktop and the rest still applies. Maybe you will be better off with a desktop, more powerful graphics card, and then more memory will be perfectly justified.

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