[NA]RAM physical appearance[NA]

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Dave Taylor
I bought a laptop with 8GB ram installed and I purchased another 8GB from Crucial.
They have significantly different appearances.
Now I wonder how many gb were in the first stick.
Can you trust what the computer tells you or is that just an electronic label that the ram vendor attaches to it and the computer picks up?

Pic:

0CD458F9-2AA1-46BF-B371-94302E12C60A.jpeg
 
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The physical electronics don’t have to look the same to have the same electrical characteristics. Describing how they works would take s couple of years of digital electronics study. If the specs are identical the chips can look completely different.

The operating system reports what it sees. It wouldn’t work correctly if it didn’t know, and coding it to lie would be a waste of time when you can look at the stick and read the label.

I think we covered in the other thread that unless the machine was reporting it was low on memory in the system monitor and/or swapping heavily, upgrading RAM will not exhibit any significant perceived performance increase until you ask it to do RAM heavy tasks.
 
The appearance is unimportant. The RAM is compatible.

Also, just as an aside, the actual chips on both sticks are made by Micron. That doesn't matter, either. It's just an observation. That's to be expected from Crucial RAM because Crucial is just one of Micron's trademarks.

What does sometimes matter (not in your situation) is the RAM's heat tolerance. Machines that do extremely demanding work require RAM that dissipates heat better. Other than that, conflicts between compatible RAM are very, very rare these days.

FWIW, I think Crucial is the best overall value in both RAM and SSD's right now.

Rich
 
Looks like one set has 4x2GB packages and the other has 8x1GB. It comes down to whichever was cheaper to build at the time.
 
So happy this thread is not about RGB lighting on RAM modules. I was about to roll in with an old man rant!
 
Thanks
I was looking at the well, I think of them as ‘chips’ - one has 4, the other 8.
And Nate seems to believe in the labeling; sounds like no chance of prevarication there.
 
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