Thinking about a memory upgrade for the Ferrari 5000

I’ve got to say that I have not fallen out of love with the pedigreed racehorse computer that my friends at AMD sent last year. I keep recommending this machine to everyone that asks me “for the ultimate laptop experience”. I have never been happier with a laptop. Typically for me, after 6 months of using a laptop, the love fades and I lust for something newer, faster, cooler. But I’m still in love with this machine.

Some of my peers asked me recently how I’d compare this Turion x2 64 bit processor to Intel’s Core 2 Duo. Tom’s Hardware has some gearhead type comparisons that look pretty decent (sans the Intel Santa Rosa). He used a Ferrari 1000 for his comparison (and that only had a Turion 56 X2 processor as opposed to the 60 in the 5000).

It isn’t as simple as that for me. It’s a holistic experience that includes the processor, the HD performance, the video performance, and the hardware and peripheral feature set. (Note: the 3945a/b/g wireless on these Intel models sucks beyond belief.) And the performance of my applications is what it’s all about. Photoshop is important to me. Benchmarks are theoretical and good marketing materials. I live in the real world.

I’ve been running Vista Ultimate x64 on the Ferrari 5000 on 2GB of RAM quite happily since I received this machine last November, but my batch image processing seems to be getting larger by the day and I’m wondering if more RAM will make Photoshop happier. It certainly takes advantage of the 64 bit processor.

The last time I priced 2x2GB sticks for this machine, it was like as much as some entire laptop computers. All of a sudden, the prices seem attractive and I’m having a hard time resisting. In fact I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before I make the call.

http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=Ferrari+5000+Series pricing is very very very sweet. It will be like a second honeymoon.