Digital Home Thoughts: The Dell XPS M1330 Kingston 4 GB RAM Upgrade

Benchmarking the Results
First things first: as expected, Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit didn't allow me access to all 4096 MB of the RAM. Instead, I had access to 3582 MB. While that's not 4 GB, it's much more than 2 GB, so I was still pleased to see the bump in overall available RAM.


Figure 9: The actual amount of RAM under 32-bit Vista.

Then I started benchmarking - and I was surprised by the results. I had hoped that Vista would be able to take advantage of the extra 1.5 GB of usable RAM and boost overall system performance, but that didn't seem to be the case. Let me explain further by going over some of the benchmark results I saw when comparing 2 GB to 4 GB - I also included tests where I had a single stick of 1 GB RAM in there, functioning in single-channel mode.

Windows Experience Index: Memory Operations Per Second
4 GB RAM: rating of 4.8
2 GB RAM: rating of 4.8
1 GB RAM: rating of 4.5

The interpretation of this data? Having RAM running in dual-channel mode helps with the speed a bit, but if the RAM is all the same speed the results are going to be identical regardless of how much there is in total.

PC Mark 2005
4 GB RAM: 5263 PCMarks
2 GB RAM: 5223 PCMarks
1 GB RAM: 5167 PCMarks

4 GB RAM: 4583 PCMarks Memory Only Test
2 GB RAM: 4566 PCMarks Memory Only Test
1 GB RAM: 4513 PCMarks Memory Only Test

A very slight difference between the three - almost not worth mentioning because it's so slight. The difference between dual channel and single channel is less in this instance than I would have thought. PC Mark is a great benchmarking program because it tests so many things, so I'm a little surprised that there isn't a bigger difference between 2 GB and 4 GB, and shocked that the 1 GB benchmark results aren't lower.

PassMark PerformanceTest
4 GB RAM: PassMark Rating of 93.8
2 GB RAM: PassMark Rating of 94.6
1 GB RAM: PassMark Rating of 104.2

This is a new application I've only recently started using, but it allows for a high degree of control when testing. This was one of the only applications in which I saw much of a difference, and only in one test: the "Memory - Large RAM" test. This test is described as follows: "This test measures the ability to allocate very large amounts of RAM and the time taken to read this RAM. The test is designed to measure the ability of the system to support applications that use very large amounts of RAM." Given the description of that test, it's not surprising that the 1 GB configuration scored 183.1 and the 4 GB configuration scored 816.7. The 2 GB config? 410.4.