I am close to upgrading my current AMD 7840 with one of the recent AMD AI motherboards and putting my current motherboard into a mainboard case. I have a spare drive, but no spare RAM. Given the current price of RAM, I can’t afford to buy a lot of RAM. What are the tradeoffs between buying one 16 or 32GB stick now and another matching stick later or buying two smaller sticks now? IOW is there an advantage in populating both RAM slots?
Two sticks of RAM is generally preferable to one because that enables dual-channel mode, which gives a performance boost in some tasks. But ultimately one stick is not a huge deal if it’s not a forever setup, you’ll be fine buying one stick now and one later.
Graphic-intensive tasks perform better in dual-channel mode, but if you only perform lighter tasks such as office work and browsing the web, you won’t notice any difference. Therefore, in most situations, it’s not a significant compromise to opt for single-channel mode.
However, if you are buying new memory, it is still recommended that you buy two sticks.
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This is a great answer. Some of the older Xe intel CPUs actually would default to older HD graphics with only one stick of RAM.
Real question is “when is ram going to be back in stock on the marketplace?” 
I want to buy another 32GB SODIMM
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Sadly, RAM purchase discussions are going to be theoretical for the next year. I got excited about running LLMs locally a year ago and bumped my desktop to 128gb and my laptop to 64gb….often it’s better to be lucky than good. At this point, the answer is run what you got and try to conserve memory like it’s 2001. When RAM prices finally re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, go for dual channel at the outset if you aren’t strapped for cash: you never know when RAM prices will moon-shot (i.e. this is not the first time that this supply squeeze has happened, nor will it be the last).