Would Increasing The Memory In A Laptop That Has Part Of It Soldered Improve Performance?
Would Increasing The Memory In A Laptop That Has Part Of It Soldered Improve Performance?
Several budget laptops with upgradable RAM appear to have half of it permanently attached. If I purchase an upgradeable 8GB model, it would come with 4GB already soldered in and the remaining 4GB as a socketed unit, leaving only one 4GB stick replaceable. This setup prevents taking advantage of faster RAM modules, potentially slowing performance when exceeding 8GB since it would operate on a single channel. Would this cause a significant slowdown? It’s unlikely modern systems would noticeably suffer from such a configuration, as they typically use available memory efficiently.
No, that's not the case I'm expressing. If the system already has 4GB soldered and another 4GB in a module, swapping it for an 8GB or 12GB module would affect performance noticeably only when exceeding 8GB, because only the 8GB portion would be dual-channel; the rest would run in single channel. The setup wouldn't switch to full dual-channel usage for the entire system.
In theory if you have 4GB fixed and add 8GB the first 4GB of the 8GB will run dual channel the remainder will run single channel.
There is a name for that but I forget.
It's unclear how AMD manages this scenario, but similar to Intel, adding an 8GB stick would result in 8GB dual channel and 4GB single channel.