G.SKILL 8GB DDR3 Laptop Memory On A Linux Ultrabook
With my purchase last month of the ASUS Zenbook Prime as a new Intel ultrabook for carrying out some development work while traveling, the only two traits of the system that I didn't like were the use of an Ivy Bridge processor over Haswell and that it had only 4GB of DDR3 system memory. Fortunately, the latter can be easily corrected and with the ultrabook order I bought a 8GB G.SKILL DDR3-1600MHz DIMM for this Core i7 system that I dual-loaded with Fedora 20 and Ubuntu Linux.
The ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VDA with Core i7 3517U "Ivy Bridge" low-power processor ships with 4GB of DDR3 system memory. The ultrabook has 2GB of system memory soldered onto the motherboard itself while there's a single DDR3 SO-DIMM connector that is loaded with an additional 2GB of system memory. Accessing the innards of the Zenbook Prime is quite easy and just involves removing all the T5 screws on the bottom of the ultrabook, after which the bottom cover quickly and easily comes off.
For upgrading the system memory in this ultrabook for carrying out Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org development work while being out of the country for a few weeks, I had bought the G.SKILL Ripjaws 8GB DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR-1600 laptop memory module (F3-1600C9S-8GRSL). The 8GB DDR3-1600MHz module is rated for CAS 9-9-9-28 latencies at 1.35V, and is compatible with both Ivy Bridge and Haswell notebooks. The G.SKILL Ripjaws F3-1600C9S-8GRSL normally sells for $75 USD but during a holiday online deal I got this 8GB of laptop memory for $55 USD, which is what made me go with G.SKILL over my preferred brands of Crucial or Corsair.
In the past couple of years on Phoronix there hasn't been as much of a focus on system memory reviews, but I figured I would share some additional benchmarks from the Zenbook Prime and show off some of the memory test profiles in the Phoronix Test Suite for those interested.
The benchmarks carried out from the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32 were all done via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. The only change between test runs was using the 4GB stock memory (2GB soldered + 2GB SO-DIMM) and then the 10GB memory configuration (2GB soldered + 10GB SO-DIMM). Just for reference for any potential Zenbook Prime customers, the ASUS UEFI doesn't allow for any memory tuning, disabling of the integrated DDR3 memory, or any other tweaking. Benchmarking happened from Ubuntu 13.10 with the mainline Linux 3.12 kernel.