So, I have a nearly 3-year-old Inspiron 1720 laptop from Dell that serves as my main PC. This machine still has a couple of years of service left in it.
I run VMware at work all day and of course I would want to have plenty of system memory to avoid hard disk paging activity under this high memory load. According to Dell, the maximum memory capacity of this machine is 4 GB (2 GB in each of two slots). However, others have discovered that 6 GB works fine in the machine, so there is no problem installing a 4 GB module along with a 2 GB module. However, installing two 4 GB modules for a total of 8 GB does not work, as there is a bug in the BIOS that will keep the machine from booting.
I decided that 4 GB is not enough for my workload so I went for the upgrade to 6 GB. It worked fine. However, I wonder, to you lose any performance by going to 6 GB? Of course, in this configuration you have a mismatched pair of RAM modules. Does stuff like dual-channel access still work?
Here are screen shots from CPU-Z regarding the memory configuration from before the memory upgrade. This is the Inspiron 1720 with two 2 GB modules installed. As you can see, the system is in dual-channel mode with a CAS latency of 5.
And, Windows ranks the memory performance at a quite respectable 5.9.
After the memory upgrade, the memory speed and performance is the same! Wonderful.
Conclusion:
The Inspiron 1720 works just fine with this above-spec amount of memory. No performance penalty for using mismatched modules.
Tags: Dell Hardware, Memory