DDR5 5600 upgrade 1x16GB to 2x16GB (worked great!)

I had a 16GB configuration. The GPU can reserve up to 50% of the RAM capacity, so 8GB.

I was limited in the LLM I can run by my RAM, so I decided to upgrade to 32GB.

Framework has a great page about ram compatibility

Framework sells a kit for 90€. I got a compatible DDR5 16GB 5600 CL46 for 54 €.

Upgrading the ram is really easy, it’s the easiest laptop to work with. It’s just 5 screws and one long flat cable. Upgrade worked out of the box without having to fiddle with memory profiles. It’s a memory stick that is baked to work 5600 out of the box.

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Benchmark before the upgrade

Benchmark after the upgrade

Latency improved from 197ns to 152ns and bandwidth doubled from 22.1GB/s to 43.3GB/s. I was under the false understanding that with DDR5 there wasn’t a big penalty for running one stick because there were two ranks, this should affect performance in bandwidth starved applications, that for an APU is basically all applications ^^’

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I benchmarked some LLM after the upgrade with LM Studio. I can now run bigger models with larger context! Framework is about three times as fast when loading all the model in the GPU, and loading on the CPU makes no meaningful difference to context size.

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