Ram upgrade on 10 years old DELL LATITUDE E5440

[SKRDPTSGL]

It's worth to upgrade ram to 16gb?It has 2gb graphics card(gtx 760),an i5 4310u for cpu a 2'5 SATA III ssd and can support ddr3l 1600mhz 16gb.I've find this kit : https://www.skroutz.gr/s/10084735/S...chytita-1600-gia-Laptop-SP008GLSTU160N02.html Is is suitable?Also is there anything else i can upgrade with low cost?

 

[dgianstefani]

Not worth it.

 

[SKRDPTSGL]

Not worth it.

It has only 6 gb of ram.I'am using it in my summerhouse as basic pc.I still play some games with it

 

[dgianstefani]

Irrelevant. It's an 11 year old laptop. Don't waste your money, something will fail soon.

 

[anonuser57]

I'd say yes, assuming you intend to keep it for a few more years. Otherwise no. Keep in mind that windows 10 only has a year of support left and after that you will need to either use some work around to upgrade to Windows 11 or switch to Linux.

 

[eidairaman1]

It's worth to upgrade ram to 16gb?It has 2gb graphics card(gtx 760),an i5 4310u for cpu a 2'5 SATA III ssd and can support ddr3l 1600mhz 16gb.I've find this kit : https://www.skroutz.gr/s/10084735/S...chytita-1600-gia-Laptop-SP008GLSTU160N02.html Is is suitable?Also is there anything else i can upgrade with low cost?

More ram you have, the better.

 

[SKRDPTSGL]

More ram you have, the better.

Is this kit suitable?

 

[bonehead123]

More ram you have, the better.

In most cases, this is true, however, in this case (crappy-spec'd 10 yo lappy), you'd just be "throwin good money after bad" as the saying goes

 

[Dr. Dro]

The owner's manual for this machine states that it has two DDR3 SODIMM slots rated for 1600 MHz. Laptops tend to be rather picky with the memory they support, so going lower or higher can often pose a problem. Instead of two individual 8 GB sticks (even if they are from the same brand), I recommend buying one that is part of a kit. That way, you'll be assured they are of the same IC type, have the same chip layout and that they will work together without throwing any weird errors or causing the latency to go as high as it goes.

From what I saw at Silicon Power's website, two of the SP008GLSTU160N02 sticks technically should work on your laptop, however, they come in two variants, one with 8 chips and one with 16 chips. Unless they're part of a kit, there is a risk that you purchase two of the same product and get one of each subvariant, and this is not something you want to deal with. This marketing problem with two completely different products (at the technical level) sharing the same SKU with different sub versions is what leads to compatibility problems and incorrect "street wisdom" such as "Corsair memory is unreliable", for example.

 

[Toothless]

Realistically any 2x8GB 1600 will work. If you can find a cheap used kit and you're going to use it then it'll be fine.

Ignore the ones that keep saying it's not worth it. If you're using the device and it fits your needs then as long as you're not overspending, you're fine.

 

[eidairaman1]

In most cases, this is true, however, in this case (crappy-spec'd 10 yo lappy), you'd just be "throwin good money after bad" as the saying goes

Not everyone needs latest tech

 

[JWNoctis]

That's both newer and more powerful than my backup laptop from the college days - I wouldn't call a GTX 760 too crappy.

An RAM upgrade to 16GB would do well if you plan to use it another couple years. Have it dusted and repasted too at the same time, if not already done. Another low cost upgrade might be replacing the ODD with a 2.5" SSD bay for more storage.

 

[eidairaman1]

It's worth to upgrade ram to 16gb?It has 2gb graphics card(gtx 760),an i5 4310u for cpu a 2'5 SATA III ssd and can support ddr3l 1600mhz 16gb.I've find this kit : https://www.skroutz.gr/s/10084735/S...chytita-1600-gia-Laptop-SP008GLSTU160N02.html Is is suitable?Also is there anything else i can upgrade with low cost?

Get a picture of the existing ram module first, Laptops can be very picky about what SO Dimm you put in.

Better yet get cpu-z and hwinfo64 and post your ram info.

Last Year I did a ram upgrade from 2GB to 4 GB on a Toshiba Satellite from 2007/2008 and it was running a Pre Release Build of W10 in 2015. It was using a module with Hynix Chips, I found another module from some off brand on Amazon using same chips and was compatible. Talk about a difference of going from 2 to 4, heck I even have the IGP/Chipset drivers installed. It was a laptop my Grandfather had and experimenting with, he passed away in 2016 from Kidney Failure with cardiac arrest. God Bless His Soul.

 

[Frick]

Realistically any 2x8GB 1600 will work. If you can find a cheap used kit and you're going to use it then it'll be fine

This.

It has only 6 gb of ram.I'am using it in my summerhouse as basic pc.I still play some games with it

That means you have one 4GB module and one 2GB module; I'd find another 4GB model. 16GB for older games and nothing else is a bit overkill, 8GB will be fine if the module is cheap enough, which they should be.

Also is there anything else i can upgrade with low cost?

Not really. The screen if you have the 768p one, provided you can find one cheap enough.

Irrelevant. It's an 11 year old laptop. Don't waste your money, something will fail soon.

My sister has an i7 2700k based desktop and she recently had to upgrade the RAM from 8GB because she was simply running out. Your suggestion would have been to NOT buy RAM for less than a McDonalds meal and instead put that money towards an AM5 build.

 

[dgianstefani]

This.

That means you have one 4GB module and one 2GB module; I'd find another 4GB model. 16GB for older games and nothing else is a bit overkill, 8GB will be fine if the module is cheap enough, which they should be.



Not really. The screen if you have the 768p one, provided you can find one cheap enough.


My sister has an i7 2700k based desktop and she recently had to upgrade the RAM from 8GB because she was simply running out. Your suggestion would have been to NOT buy RAM for less than a McDonalds meal and instead put that money towards an AM5 build.

A desktop is much more likely to continue working without issue than a laptop, which runs close to overheating and with the bare minimum in power delivery circuitry etc.

 

[Frick]

A desktop is much more likely to continue working without issue than a laptop, which runs close to overheating and with the bare minimum in power delivery circuitry etc.

Remember this is an old business laptop, which in my experience are much better than later ones. My e6430 was kickass with the quad core i7, and I replaced that in may this year. OP has a low power i5. Sure it may die, but so may you or I, and "investing" the cost of a lunch into it is not a useless thing.

 

[CptCat]

A desktop is much more likely to continue working without issue than a laptop, which runs close to overheating and with the bare minimum in power delivery circuitry etc.

I might disagree. I have a laptop from what it seems another era now. It's an asus k52jt which my parents bought me when i went to university in 2011. It has an i5 480m, 4gb of ram 1066mhz and an absolute crap of gpu - radeon hd6370m. And though i'm not using it as a main since 2016, the things it endured during its lifetime are unimaginable. Nevertheless, it is still working nowadays with upgraded ram to 8gb and an ssd, so even win 10, which seems a bit heavy for such specs, is doing ok.
In terms of the topic - yeah, i think you should upgrade, especially since the prices on so-dimm ddr 3 are comparable to pack of crunches, ssd's are also cheap. It won't make a drastic difference, but overall experience will get better, and in such cases every bit helps.

 

[SKRDPTSGL]

I might disagree. I have a laptop from what it seems another era now. It's an asus k52jt which my parents bought me when i went to university in 2011. It has an i5 480m, 4gb of ram 1066mhz and an absolute crap of gpu - radeon hd6370m. And though i'm not using it as a main since 2016, the things it endured during its lifetime are unimaginable. Nevertheless, it is still working nowadays with upgraded ram to 8gb and an ssd, so even win 10, which seems a bit heavy for such specs, is doing ok.
In terms of the topic - yeah, i think you should upgrade, especially since the prices on so-dimm ddr 3 are comparable to pack of crunches, ssd's are also cheap. It won't make a drastic difference, but overall experience will get better, and in such cases every bit helps.

Get a picture of the existing ram module first, Laptops can be very picky about what SO Dimm you put in.

Better yet get cpu-z and hwinfo64 and post your ram info.

Last Year I did a ram upgrade from 2GB to 4 GB on a Toshiba Satellite from 2007/2008 and it was running a Pre Release Build of W10 in 2015. It was using a module with Hynix Chips, I found another module from some off brand on Amazon using same chips and was compatible. Talk about a difference of going from 2 to 4, heck I even have the IGP/Chipset drivers installed. It was a laptop my Grandfather had and experimenting with, he passed away in 2016 from Kidney Failure with cardiac arrest. God Bless His Soul.

I might disagree. I have a laptop from what it seems another era now. It's an asus k52jt which my parents bought me when i went to university in 2011. It has an i5 480m, 4gb of ram 1066mhz and an absolute crap of gpu - radeon hd6370m. And though i'm not using it as a main since 2016, the things it endured during its lifetime are unimaginable. Nevertheless, it is still working nowadays with upgraded ram to 8gb and an ssd, so even win 10, which seems a bit heavy for such specs, is doing ok.
In terms of the topic - yeah, i think you should upgrade, especially since the prices on so-dimm ddr 3 are comparable to pack of crunches, ssd's are also cheap. It won't make a drastic difference, but overall experience will get better, and in such cases every bit helps.

 

[DaemonForce]

I don't know enough about how this system behaves to make an educated guess but it must be at least tolerable if we're talking about it.
The DELL mark turns this into the biggest mystery slop that probably hates non-OEM memory kits at worst and likes single DIMM per channel at best.
I've never seen a laptop carry more than 2 DIMMs so we're probably okay.
1600 was not a fun speed on desktop 15 years ago and I wouldn't want to put that into a laptop if it can be avoided.
I run 4GB of it in my Surface tablet and it's insufferable. I just use it to load up Twitch streams in the background and it errors out a few times per day.
The i5-4310u trades blows with my Phenom II X4 955 BE (a 2009 product) and gets obsoleted by everything real fast. Not a great start.

I ran a 2GB card in that system when I moved everything over to a better board. I think it was the HD6570. The system had a total of 4GB DDR3-1600 ram and a 30GB SSD. It ran Server 2008 (Vista) for the longest time after struggling with Win7 and Win8. Pretty sure 2012R2 (Win8.1) was the tipping point where I needed more memory for VR stuff. I'm not sure what you would do with such an old system on 6GB and no graphical successor but it can't be all that demanding at 15W. You're never going to use 16GB and that's a GOOD thing. I say go for it. €20 isn't that great of a setback and the kits are already so long in the tooth you're pulled that direction anyway. Just make sure it's the right memory and it should be fine.

If my DDR2 box had options I would have maxxed them out a long time ago. I think this is for the best.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I don't know enough about how this system behaves to make an educated guess but it must be at least tolerable if we're talking about it.
The DELL mark turns this into the biggest mystery slop that probably hates non-OEM memory kits at worst and likes single DIMM per channel at best.
I've never seen a laptop carry more than 2 DIMMs so we're probably okay.
1600 was not a fun speed on desktop 15 years ago and I wouldn't want to put that into a laptop if it can be avoided.
I run 4GB of it in my Surface tablet and it's insufferable. I just use it to load up Twitch streams in the background and it errors out a few times per day.
The i5-4310u trades blows with my Phenom II X4 955 BE (a 2009 product) and gets obsoleted by everything real fast. Not a great start.

View attachment 363916

I ran a 2GB card in that system when I moved everything over to a better board. I think it was the HD6570. The system had a total of 4GB DDR3-1600 ram and a 30GB SSD. It ran Server 2008 (Vista) for the longest time after struggling with Win7 and Win8. Pretty sure 2012R2 (Win8.1) was the tipping point where I needed more memory for VR stuff. I'm not sure what you would do with such an old system on 6GB and no graphical successor but it can't be all that demanding at 15W. You're never going to use 16GB and that's a GOOD thing. I say go for it. €20 isn't that great of a setback and the kits are already so long in the tooth you're pulled that direction anyway. Just make sure it's the right memory and it should be fine.

If my DDR2 box had options I would have maxxed them out a long time ago. I think this is for the best.

Realistically the 4310U is significantly faster than the X4 955, especially when vectorized instructions are involved, but yes, it is an old chip. However, I reckon memory is cheap enough and the machine is still usable, so as long as OP keeps the bill to a minimum, laptops of that age are some of the last that were built with usability over form in mind. Might be worth even throwing in a replacement battery in the budget - if anything, it'll make a fine Linux workhorse IMO

 

[remixedcat]

The owner's manual for this machine states that it has two DDR3 SODIMM slots rated for 1600 MHz. Laptops tend to be rather picky with the memory they support, so going lower or higher can often pose a problem. Instead of two individual 8 GB sticks (even if they are from the same brand), I recommend buying one that is part of a kit. That way, you'll be assured they are of the same IC type, have the same chip layout and that they will work together without throwing any weird errors or causing the latency to go as high as it goes.

From what I saw at Silicon Power's website, two of the SP008GLSTU160N02 sticks technically should work on your laptop, however, they come in two variants, one with 8 chips and one with 16 chips. Unless they're part of a kit, there is a risk that you purchase two of the same product and get one of each subvariant, and this is not something you want to deal with. This marketing problem with two completely different products (at the technical level) sharing the same SKU with different sub versions is what leads to compatibility problems and incorrect "street wisdom" such as "Corsair memory is unreliable", for example.

with how dell is they normally tell you the max available supported at the time, but often you can upgrade to more than the documentation states. for example on my inspiron 3525 here they claim 16GB but 32GB works at 3200Mhz and 64GB @ 2400Mhz. Same as their HDD/SSD/NVMESSD specs too.

BTW I had a E5540 and it was capable of more on Linux. I did even manage to produce a track using bitwig studio on it decently as long as I put the CPU governor on "perfomance"... I sold it some months ago so I can't replicate and tests. I did record a video so I'll find it and show you later...

 

[eidairaman1]

View attachment 363893

English?

 

[:D:D]

@SKRDPTSGL blocked from your link but FWIW I still run an old Haswell laptop and when I first bought it, it came with one Elpida DDR3L 1600MT/s module. Couldn't source a second one so used a mixed 2x8GB which worked fine (very similar timings) and could even be OC'd to 1866MT/s without problems. Had a 2x4GB kit working at 2400MT/s at one time for while. The laptop itself is spec'd for up to 1600MT/s.

A lot of manufacturers back then skimped on the memory voltage reg and used a fixed 1.35V so I would recommend only using DDR3L unless your sure you laptop can support 1.5V.

 

[lexluthermiester]

It's worth to upgrade ram to 16gb?It has 2gb graphics card(gtx 760),an i5 4310u for cpu a 2'5 SATA III ssd and can support ddr3l 1600mhz 16gb.I've find this kit : https://www.skroutz.gr/s/10084735/S...chytita-1600-gia-Laptop-SP008GLSTU160N02.html Is is suitable?Also is there anything else i can upgrade with low cost?

If you still use this system and it works well, then yes, 16GB upgrade can be worth it and easily done.

Ignore the nay-sayers.

It has only 6 gb of ram.I'am using it in my summerhouse as basic pc.I still play some games with it

This means you're running a 2GB dimm and a 4GB dimm. This is a mismatch and the system is likely running in single channel mode which limits your RAM performance. Getting a matched pair of 8GB dimms would be a nice upgrade from what you have now.

A DDR3-1600 or DDR3-1866 16GB kit can be found for about $25 or $30(maybe less depending on where you look), so it an inexpensive upgrade to boot!

Your laptop might be older, but it's still a solidly good performing model. Upgrade it and enjoy!

Ignore the ones that keep saying it's not worth it.

Exactly!

 

[Wirko]

This means you're running a 2GB dimm and a 4GB dimm. This is a mismatch and the system is likely running in single channel mode which limits your RAM performance. Getting a matched pair of 8GB dimms would be a nice upgrade from what you have now.

Memory controllers adapt well to what they have at hand. In this case, 4 GB operate in dual-channel mode (half of the larger module + the smaller module). 2 GB operate in single-channel mode (the other half of the larger module).

To spend as little as possible, I'd even consider buying a single 8 GB module, retain the 4 GB one and throw out the smallest one.

But what is the correct type of memory? Will normal DDR3 work reliably? Ark says that mobile Haswell needs the low-voltage variant, DDR3L.