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79177
August 5th, 2014 13:00
XPS 15 (L502x) upgrade: SSD and / or RAM
Hi
I have a two year old XPS15 (L502x) with a second generation i7 processor, 6gb RAM and 750gn HDD.
It's starting to feel a little slow, so I'm thinking of upgrading it to 16gb RAM (2x Kingston KTD-L3B/8G) and/or a 1tb SSD (Panasonic 840 evo). The RAM is about half the price of the SSD (about £375 in total, a lot cheaper than a new XPS15 at ~£1500).
Which is likely to have the greatest performance improvement (I suspect the RAM)?
If I upgrade both, do I need to keep a page file? (Given the frequency that it changes, how will this affect the endurance of an SSD?)
Thanks in advance
Mai
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Bwhaaaap
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August 12th, 2014 09:00
Hi there,
The 2630QM in the L502X does in fact support up to 16GB of RAM. Being a second gen, it's only limited to 16GB. I actually have the same laptop as you and have just upgraded my ram from 8GB 1333MHz RAM to 16GB 1600MHz Ram. The RAM I used is the Corsair Vengeance and according to CPU-Z, all of this RAM has been recognised by the laptop and has not been downclocked at all like some people have said in forums. In terms of performance wise, the laptop does seem a bit more responsive in terms of the feel of the system. Since I use programs that require a lot of RAM such as programming, I have in fact seen a big increase in performance in that aspect. I have also bought a 240GB Sandisk Extreme II SSD which is waiting to be installed when I receive my caddy that's in the mail. I believe the SSD will have the most noticeable performance increase when your OS is installed in there and will be 'snappy' as well as boot times drastically drop.
Hope that helps you and clears something up.
Bwhaaaap
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August 14th, 2014 09:00
Hi again,
Just an update after installing my ssd. After a fresh, clean install of the OS in the ssd, the boot time was incredible. It was around 10 seconds give or take a second or two from the moment I pressed the power on button. After installing my HDD and the relevant softwares/drivers, the laptop now starts up in around 30 seconds, but it feels extremely responsive and everything is almost instant.
So yeah, in my opinion, the SSD is by far the best upgrade to your laptop unless of course you're using memory intensive programs.
zwer4e
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August 5th, 2014 17:00
L502x does not support more than 8GB ram DDR3 1333Mhz.
upgrading from HDD to SSD will make much more difference than 6GB ram to 8GB ram
About the page file - most advice I got was to leave page file but I removed it because of the same consideration you have and have not had a problem yet.... though with less than 8GB of ram windows might start complaining it is low on virtual memory....
mailing
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August 6th, 2014 02:00
Thanks for your observations.
Although Dell's documentation suggests that the L502x supports a maximum of 8gb RAM, it actually works with 16gb: check any of the major memory suppliers' configuration tools or perform a Google search for confirmation of this.
I'd agree that upgrading from 6gb to 8gb won't make a tremendous difference, but I suspect (hope) that upgrading to 16gb will be significant.
I also have a third-gen i5 XPS18 which has a 500gb HDD & 32gb SDD with 8gb RAM, and it is significantly quicker than my XPS15. I'm not sure which factors make it quicker: RAM, SSD, processor or OS (it runs Win 8.1 whereas my XPS15 is on Win 7 home premium).
Even at 6gb, the XPS15 has never been memory-bound, so I'd agree about disabling virtual memory with 16gb.
Thanks
mailing
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August 14th, 2014 11:00
Thanks for the update.
I've just checked my system logs, and startup time (from completely shutdown) is typically between 90,000ms and 120,000ms (that's up to two minutes), even from new. I do have quite a lot installed, mind, (Norton 360; MS Office Professional; various Adobe products including FrameMaker, InDesign, PhotoShop; numerous camera & smartphone suites; all MS updates, etc). If I could get startup down to 30 seconds with an SSD, I'd be very satisfied.
Looks like an SSD is the way forward, and move my existing HDD into a caddy in place of the DVD drive (which I almost never use) and put the page file on that. Although I think I'll increase the RAM at the same time.
Thanks again.