[OT]: Memory & Performance

[Ramon]

On Tuesday, 3 September 2013 at 16:15:51 UTC, Chris wrote:
> If you had the choice between:
>
> - 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 1 X 4 GB
> - 8 GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 2 X 4GB ( + $49.00 )
>
> Is it worth the extra money or is the increase in performance 
> not worth mentioning? Any experience with that.
>
> The processor
>
> 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4700MQ Processor ( 2.4 GHz 6MB 
> L3 Cache - 4 Cores plus Hyperthreading )
>
> Thanks.

That very much depends on your usage scenario. My rather old 
(T500, 2*2,8 GHz, 4GB, normal hard disk) notebook still feels 
perfectly fine even for the occasional movie.

For Windoze I don't know but for linux and FreeBSD a 4GB dual 
core system is absolutely OK and that includes software 
development even with IDE unless you use Eclipse. Unless you want 
to compile linux or gcc or the like frequently a Core7 is 
actually overkill/luxury.

Generally speaking though, you might want to always have 2 (equal 
size) RAMs rather than 1.
As for SSDs, I have one on my main system and it's nice but 
frankly, with linux buffering and enough RAM the difference 
usually isn't that noticeable.

A+ -R