buying computer memory

[Pravit]

Does anyone have experience buying computer (laptop) memory in China? I'm aware you have to be careful about corrupted memory and that sort of thing, but I have noticed the "散装" memory seems quite cheap here (Kingston and other "boxed" brands seem just as expensive as in the US). Should I go for the cheap memory, or play it safe and buy it when I return to the US?

[rootfool]

Should I go for the cheap memory, or play it safe and buy it when I return to the US?

If you have a friend who can assure you to buy a cheap but in good condition memory.then you can buy the 散裝 memory.If not,buy the "boxed".

it's a very strange situation in china now: You must know everything about what you want to buy,so you can avoid being deceived,especially the IT production.:evil:

[simonlaing]

Hi Pravit,

I found buying cheap Chinese brands means the reliability and actuall performance might be slightly less that the name brand. But most of the time this isn't a big problem. Also if you take your laptop there they will often install it for you in the store and you can test it right then and there. Have a game or video editing software handy to test the memory speed if possible. That way you can see if it makes a big difference. Some will let you try the boxed chips and compare the two.

As I said, most of the time the performance is very similar.

Have fun,

Simon:)

[Pravit]

Thanks for the tip, simon! I'm mainly concerned from all those horror stories of various impossible-to-pin-down computer problems related to corrupted memory, but perhaps I'll give it a shot if I can test it right in the store

[Prodigal Son]

I wouldn't even mess with non-name brand RAM (Geil, Kingston, Crucial, Mushkin, etc). I recently bought a 1gb chip of DDR ram for my desktop and it made my computer crash every few minutes. Took it back and exchanged it for name brand RAM (paid 20 yuan extra) and haven't had a problem since then. Faulty RAM can really be a bitch and cause unexpected, difficult to troubleshoot problems.