Acer Veriton X480G Memory

Iggy
Iggy Member Posts: 9

Tinkerer

edited March 1 in 2018 Archives
Not a question but I wanted to document to adventures I had trying to upgrade the RAM for an old Acer Veriton X480G we had at work in a small retail shop in the back office based in Sydney Australia. Hope this helps someone else trying to do the same thing. The hard disk was thrashing as I had multiple applications and browser windows opened at the same time. 

If you live near the USA or UK the upgrade will be less painful. Also double check your version of Windows 7. If it is 32 bit it is useless getting more than 4GB of RAM in total. I could of probably gotten away with 3GB total but more on that later.

The PC had two 1GB DDR3 memory sticks of differing types. One was Kingston ACR128X64D3U1333C9 and the other a UNIFOSA 
GU502203EP0201. A google search came up empty for Australia but a few sites in the US and UK had preowned RAM with these part numbers. I read these are OEM parts and were never sold direct to consumers.

A visit to the Kingston website with a search on discontinued PC systems bought up that they sold system specific memory in 2GB and 1GB sizes but were discountinued. Part numbers were KAC-VR313/2G and KAC-VR313/1G respectively.

A google search brought up only 2 websites in Australia that had them. First one was a dodgy site that didn't even had SSL on the payment page so was dismissed. The second site was a computer warehouse I have dealt with before. They had the 2GB version KAC-VR313/2G available so ordered 2 sticks with payment on pickup. If the transaction was successful the PC would have had 6GB of RAM in total.

Next day I call up to confirm only to be told they only had 1 stick available. I wasn't sure if the computer would work with an odd number of memory sticks installed so cancelled the order. This was a blessing in disguise.

As I continued looking for RAM, possibly from overseas I discovered that Windows 7 32bit can only handle up to 4GB of memory. This actually includes the memory in the Graphics card and anywhere else on the motherboard.

Sure enough the version of windows 7 pre installed was 32bit. I tested the computer to see if it would run on 1 memory stick and this was successful. At this stage I was contemplating getting new memory from overseas. A search for 
Acer X480G memory brought up a few sights selling other brands of RAM claiming to work on an Acer X480G.

But since the successful test of running 1 stick I decided to play it safer and go back to the original Sydney shop for the 2GB Kingston KAC-VR313/2G. The PC was not going to be used for anything more intensive than multiple Google Chrome windows opened at once so I wasn't overly concerned about getting a pair of 1GB to take advantage of dual channel.

I installed the additional 2GB Kingston KAC-VR313/2G and it worked. I had my standard 15 to 20 Google Chrome windows opened as I update our website and check competitor pricing etc and the hard disk doesn't thrash anymore. Windows recognises the PC having 4GB of RAM however only 2.97GB is usable.

I am assuming the other memory address space is allocated to the graphic card or some other motherboard component. So I could have potentially had the same performance upgrade with a 1GB memory stick if I could have spent the time to find a compatible version.

However the salesperson at the shop told me DDR3 RAM especially in that small size is getting phased out and hard to come by so I was happy to just get the upgrade working.