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

Searching for a Real-World Benefit
Since the benchmarks didn't show much, if any, improvement between 2 GB and 4 GB, I decided to try some real-world tests. First I tried my Nero Recode test. The results? Absolutely no significant performance difference between 1 GB, 2 GB, and 4 GB. Video transcoding is almost completely CPU-based, so throwing more RAM at the problem has no impact. It's possible that with a slow 4200 RPM hard drive I might have seen a difference, but the 7200 RPM drive was fast enough to keep the RAM full and feeding the CPU.

Next, I tried the DxO RAW photo test, and the results were more telling: with 4 GB of RAM, the XPS M1330 took 5 minutes and 44 seconds to convert the 20 RAW images to JPEG. With 2 GB, it was within seconds of the same time. With 1 GB, however, it took nearly twice as long: 9 minutes and 50 seconds. It seems DxO is heavily RAM-based and 1 GB just wasn't enough for it, but 2 GB was.

Thinking perhaps I was onto something with the RAW files, next I tried going for a much bigger data set, thinking it might show a significant difference between 2 GB and 4 GB: I took 1000 RAW images and converted them to JPEG using Adobe Lightroom 1.2. The results? The 2 GB and 4 GB configurations were within 60 seconds of each other, which isn't significant when the overall time was 26 to 27 minutes.

Conclusion
Windows Vista uses RAM much more effectively than Windows XP - it will aggressively cache frequently used programs to RAM rather than let it sit empty. This is why even when nothing is open or running, Vista will report you have almost no RAM free. This is a good thing, because RAM sitting there doing nothing doesn't give you any benefits. Vista can easily fill up 3582 MB of RAM - the XPS M1330 has 2709 MB cached and only 13 MB of RAM free as I write this. Benchmarking this and getting hard numbers is a much more difficult thing - I ran the PCMark benchmark over and over, hoping Vista would cache some of the program and I'd see some speed improvements, but they were very minor (and perhaps not even a result of memory caching). Hopefully someday we'll see benchmarking software that's optimized for Vista.

While I was unable to see any significant performance difference between 2 GB and 4 GB of RAM with the types of scenarios I was running, there's one specific instance where I know it would make a difference: Virtual Machines. If you're running virtual OS software where you allocate a specific amount of RAM to the virtual machine, that RAM becomes unavailable to your main OS so you'll want every MB of RAM you can squeeze into your computer to ensure decent performance.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He loves his XPS M1330 with 4 GB of RAM, even if it doesn't seem any faster than 2 GB.