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Before you mark this as duplicate, I request you go through my question in detail as I have some very specific question regarding the RAM upgrade on my Dell XPS15 L502X. And please bear with my lack of understanding of these things, I have no experience of dealing with such things first hand.

The below is a screen-shot of memory from CPU-Z

enter image description here

From this it is clear that it is dual channel - which is good. The next is screen shot from specification of i5 2450M CPU running on this laptop. enter image description here

And here are my specific questions

  1. On the specification screen shot, what does 1066/1333 mean? Does that play any role in determining whether additional RAM can be supported by this processor?
  2. Processor support max of 2 channels but how do I find out if there actually are 2 channels?
  3. What is ECC memory? As the spec says it is not supported, should I be looking for non-ECC RAM?
  4. Do I also need to check my motherboard specification to confirm that the motherboard supports additional RAM? If yes, how do I check that?
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    check the board specs. pcworld.com said it supports max 8GB but cannot be sure
    – clhy
    Oct 22, 2015 at 21:08
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    "Dual" from your screenshot
    – Ramhound
    Oct 22, 2015 at 22:31

4 Answers 4

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According to the Dell Manual page 94, the maximum memory suported is 8GB consisting of 4GB in each memory module.

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1) DDR3 1066/1333 is the speed of the RAM in Mhz

2) EEC memory is error correcting code memory, it can detect and correct internal errors. If it says it's unsupported then yes, you should look for non-ecc RAM. Some boards will take ECC (without the ECC functionality), others won't. Best practice is to use the correct RAM for the board.

3) Dual channel should be indicated in the BIOS and/or at boot time

4) From the Dell support website http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04 or whichever is closest to your location

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1066/1333 means that your laptop can support 1066 MHz or 1333 MHz. These are very common, especially 1333 MHz ram. So just make sure the ram you are buying supports these frequencies.

I believe the support of 2 channels max only means that you can have up to 2 sticks of ram in your laptop. Which only has two slots anyway, so no worries there.

ECC mean Error Correcting Code RAM. This type of ram is not compatible with your motherboard. Make sure the ram you are buying is not ECC RAM.

For your last question, you will be replacing one or both sticks of ram with new sticks with more capacity. As I said, your laptop probably doesn't have more than two ram slots anyway.

I hope this answered your questions.

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1) 1066/1333 are the transfer rates in MT/s supported by the CPU's memory controller - multiply by 8 bytes to get the theoretical max bandwidth per channel. Contrary to the popular interpretation, the frequency is half the transfer rate.
The capacity of additional (SD)RAM is not affected by transfer rates, but modules not supporting these rates (rather rare, but possible; higher rate modules usually support lower transfer rates) would be of no use to the laptop.

2) As you have 6 GB of (SD)RAM, and knowing that there are no memory sticks manufactured of such capacity, one can deduce that your laptop has either 4 + 2 GB sticks (or, highly unlikely, 2 + 2 + 1 + 1 GB), so you have 2 sticks of (SD)RAM, which makes it rather likely to be used in dual channel configuration.
What is more, CPU-Z shows "Dual" under "Channel #", which means that yes, your laptop's (SD)RAM is, in fact, in dual-channel mode.

3) As answered previously, ECC stands for Error Correcting Code, this type of (SD)RAM usually is not compatible with non-ECC (SD)RAM and mainly used in workstation computers servers.
You should avoid it for your laptop.

4) Yes, you should check that, manufacturers usually list that number as well.
As commented previously, and from 2), 8 GB is mostly guaranteed to be supported.
16 GB support, on the other hand, is questionable, according to Dell forums: a couple of users state to be using 16 GB fine, another states that the chipset supports 16 GB, while Dell states to support 8 GB max.

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