Should I get Low Density RAM Upgrade for XPS 8300?

Oace,

It is best to stick wit the memory that the Computer manufacturer installed in the system. Below is the memory information for your system.

Memory

Image-Memory module
The XPS™ 8300 system uses 1333 MHz DDR3 unbuffered SDRAM. DDR3 SDRAM or double-data-rate three synchronous dynamic random access memory is a random access memory technology. It is a part of the SDRAM family of technologies, which is one of many DRAM (dynamic random access memory) implementations, and is an evolutionary improvement over its predecessor, DDR2 SDRAM.

Its primary benefit is the ability to run its I/O bus at four times the speed of the memory cells it contains, thus enabling faster bus speeds and higher peak throughputs than earlier technologies. This is achieved at the cost of higher latency. Also, the DDR3 standard allows for chip capacities of 512 Megabit to 8 Gigabit, effectively enabling memory modules of maximum 16 Gigabit in size.

DDR3 memory comes with a promise of a power consumption reduction of 30% compared to current commercial DDR2 modules due to DDR3’s 1.5 V supply voltage, compared to DDR2’s 1.8 V or DDR’s 2.5 V. This supply voltage works well with the 90 nm fabrication technology used for most DDR3 chips. Some manufacturers further propose to use "dual-gate" transistors to reduce leakage of current.

The main benefit of DDR3 comes from the higher bandwidth made possible by DDR3’s 8 bit deep prefetch buffer, whereas DDR2’s is 4 bits, and DDR’s is 2 bits deep.

Theoretically, these modules could transfer data at the effective clock rate of 800-1600 MHz (using both edges of a 400-800 MHz I/O clock), compared to DDR2’s current range of effective 400-800 MHz (200-400 MHz clock) or DDR’s range of 200-400 MHz (100-200 MHz). To date, such bandwidth requirements have been mainly found in the graphics market, where fast transfer of information between frame buffers is required.

Memory Modes Supported

The XPS™ 8300 supports the following memory mode operations with performance depending on configuration:

• Dual-channel symmetric mode, in which both channels are populated with the same memory size. This configuration yields peak memory performance as both channels are used simultaneously.
• Dual-channel asymmetric mode, in which both channels are populated but with different memory amounts. This configuration yields the performance of a single channel of memory with the combined memory size of the two channels.
• Single-channel mode, in which only one channel is populated.

NOTE: DDR3 DIMMs have 240 pins, the same number as DDR2, and are the same size, but are electrically incompatible and have a different key notch location.

Features

DDR3 SDRAM Components:

• Introduction of asynchronous RESET pin
• Support of system level flight time compensation
• On-DIMM Mirror friendly DRAM pin out
• Introduction of CWL (CAS Write Latency) per speed bin
• On-die IO calibration engine
• READ and WRITE calibration

DDR3 Modules:

• Fly-by command/address/control bus with On-DIMM termination
• High precision calibration resistors

Advantages compared to DDR2

• Higher bandwidth performance increase (up to effective 1600 MHz)
• Performance increase at low power (longer battery life in laptops)
• Enhanced low power features
• Improved thermal design (cooler)

Disadvantages compared to DDR2

• Commonly higher CAS Latency
• Generally costs much more than equivalent DDR2 memory for now