I’m new to Framework. My current Laptop is a 7 year old MSI 16” with intel core i7 7th Gen, 16GB Ram, 250GB SSHD and NVIDIA Quadro Graphics Card with, I believe 4GB Ram.
Anyway, I don’t do gaming. I do 3D CAD, Office Suite stuff, email, program PLC/HMI stuff, surf the internet and watch Amazon/YouTube videos.
This is the basic FW16 that I have configured with 32GB Ram + 1TB SSD Primary + Windows 11 Pro:
First question is… when choosing 32GB Ram, is there advantage to 2 x 16 -vs- 1 x 32? What’s the difference? Later expansion? Speed? Lower replacement cost?
A RAM chip has a fixed bandwidth.
Say one chip can do 1GBytes per second.
If you have two RAM chips, it read one byte from one RAM chip, the next byte from the second RAM chip, and then the 3rd byte from the first RAM chip.
As it is balancing the reads across two RAM chips, it then achieves a total bandwidth of 2GBytes per second.
It is not any better latency, but the amount of RAM bytes is can transfer is doubled.
Caveat, it only really makes a difference for application that use a lot of RAM. E.g. LLMs, compiling programs, application that use the iGPU a lot.
In the general case, you probably will not notice much difference.
OK. Thanks!! I assume that you mean that the 2x16 may be faster, because of double the pathways at the same speed, but, practically speaking, I probably won’t know the difference, especially when compared to what I am currently using. Did I get that right?
My biggest load will be having several large 3D Models and/or DWGs open, all at the same time, but that newer, faster, 8GB GDDR6 Graphics Card is probably going deal with that quite nicely!
