Alright so I already know that 96GB is not officially supported but Ik of people that have used it on the FW13 AMD with no issues. I’m not much of a gamer, so my FW16 will be used more for my other hobbies such as coding, music production, working with virtual machines and occasionally teleworking. For reference my work laptop runs 128gb of RAM at 2933mhz. There’s only a $80-$90 dollar difference in the kits I’m looking at just trying to see if it makes sense to go 96GB or if 64GB of ddr5 will do fine and what difference does the clock speed make when working with virtual machines or 3d modeling.
In synthetics the difference will be noticeable, although I don’t know how pronounced. In the real world…I’d go for little to nothing noticeable to us. Maybe in some edge cases. I’d say having enough memory to make sure you don’t start to swap is more the determining performance factor. Is your modeling or VM(s) going to get up to 50+GB of used RAM? In that case, you’re probably edging towards starting to hit swap in a bit, or if you have a lot of browser tabs you might be really close. Or if you have VMs plus modeling all running at the same time, might start getting close to your max used.
But if you figure you’re most likely going to be 20-30GB of VMs/modeling, well, 64GB is plenty.
For me, personally, I’m going for 96GB. But that’s me, my work VM is a big memory hog (don’t ask…). It works OK on my current laptop with 64GB, but I wouldn’t mind having more memory to give myself more overhead.
3 Likes
Thanks, yeah I wanted to avoid swapping just wasn’t sure if I was overestimating the amount of RAM. What kit are you going with?
No clue yet. I’m in Batch 12, so when I get the “your # is up!” email, I’ll do some research here on the forums and what’s available and buy some.
…then you won’t notice the difference in latency. And the more VMs you run, the more RAM you’re going to need, so you’re probably better off the with the 96GB kit.
I want to be able to do both moderately, so I got a 64GB CL40 kit. Once I run out of space, I guess 128GB modules will be out and officially supported by AMD. 
I do wonder if you won’t have a higher CL still. At the same time…who cares right now? You’ll figure it out when/if the time comes for yourself 
Either the 48Gb sodimms got a hell of a lot cheaper or you are looking at way too expensive 32Gb ones.
Given you wait long enough you probably pay less for a 2x32 now and 2x128 then than you’d pay for the 2x48 now XD. Not sure it’ll ever be officially supported though.
That was meant as a joke. I don’t expect to run out of RAM before DDR6 becomes mainstream. 
The law of diminishing returns probably applies here.
So the answer is both, the kingston kit is quite expensive in this case and the 48gb crucial kit is like 350 around here (and were over 400 when I got my kingstons).
For 300 it’s a bit more tempting if it wasn’t such massive overkill.
I personally don’t touch anything that is not in powers of two. Every single time and very consistently devices that do not follow that die or has issues far more often than those that do follow that rule. If you need extra space you can set up a bigger swap partition on something like the secondary ssd. But then again you probably are just going to upgrade after a few years so who cares?
2 Likes
That is not a substitute if you actually need the space.
You have situations where you need fast memory and situations where you do not. If you are dealing with VMs you can change the settings of the hypervisor to change where the machine is run from depending on factors or if you don’t have as capable of one to write a script to do so.
Frankly speaking, if you need super high RAM requirements, you should just get a SFF PC and carry a power supply if that is absolutely needed until laptops with the RAM requirements you need become available without the sketchy compromises. The biggest constraint for VMs is going to be the CPU more often than not anyhow.
There are tasks that just need a ton of ram and swap really isn’t a substitute there (though it can make them theoretically run though at abysmal speeds) like certain rendering tasks and scientiffic computation and stuff like that. Or hell maybe even some cursed eldrich excel sheet that is holding a multinational company together XD.
For me personally even 64gb is overkill but I got a good deal on the ram.
Yeah, but you kinda should have something more powerful to offload that to while you use the laptop as a terminal or to do smaller batch runs. A lot of people just try to force a laptop to work for them when a pc would be cheaper and more suited to their needs.
If someone needs to use it for a small job here or there that you are not using most of the time, swap will get it done. With SSDs it is not as terrible as it used to be, but yeah, definitely not ideal.
I would need 32GB but I like keeping a good buffer, so I generally just go for the max without hampering performance.
It is still pretty neat if a laptop can do that and we are mostly there or not very far from it.
Depends on what, in most cases it’ll mostly just stop it from crashing but getting it done in a reasonable time-frame (in case of a render it’ll increase the render time by orders of magnitude in a lot of cases) not really. SSDs did get faster but so did ram and the latency on the ssd is still astronomical.
Yeah…that’d be nice if network latency might not be an issue. My VM is large (production biz data set) on memory usage, but light on CPU, since it’s for local testing & using JVM Remote Debug for debugging. And the remote debugging over a high latency connection can be incredibly horrible to work with. So more memory for me would be great. I also tend to have a lot of windows/tabs open at the same time.
But that’s me, not the right answer for everybody or every situation.
Yeah, that usually is the killer depending on the job. Thankfully things like pcie to pcie connectors in enterprise are starting to come into the consumer market.
I see. Yeah things like databases can get really annoying even in enterprise servers.
I was more so talking about connecting directly to the computer than something like a cloud service.
Yep. Maybe in 2-3 years we might not need desktops for most situations aside from graphics. Laptop CPUs are already doing better than most old desktop CPUs with lower power consumption. Memory capacity is also getting much better. Would rather the SSDs become more reliable though.