Thursday, September 4, 2008

More than 2Gb of RAM on the SI1520

Fellow blog reader Helder (thanks!) reports his experience in expanding his SI1520's memory over the limit of 2Gbs, which is what is stated in the official specifications of this laptop:

I have put 2GB + 1GB of DDR2-667 memory, and it worked just fine. I've tried with 2 x 2 GB, but the laptop couldn't recognize past the 3 GB.
Besides, I suspect that there are implications regarding the video memory allocation, because when I booted into either XP or Ubuntu, the screen went all blank, altough the computer was still responsive. It might be the case of just some tweaking.

I used Kingston memory, with these part numbers:

- 2GB - KVR667D2S5/2G
- 1GB - KVR667D2S5/1G

If anyone managed to make the SI1520 work with two 2Gbs memory modules, please let us know, even if the laptop only recognizes a total of 3Gbs!
In fact, the use of two memory modules of the same type would make a "dual channel" setup, allowing the laptop to access memory much faster, since it would see them as a single 128bit wide memory bank, instead of two 64bit wide banks.

Update 4/18/2009: user neustaedter points out that using Windows Vista 64, the system recognizes all 4Gb. This does not work with BIOS v1.20, and v1.10 needs to be installed.