[RESPONDED] 1 x 32GB VS 2 x 16GB

Framework Laptop 16
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Hello Framework community!

I’m ordering a Laptop 16 and plan to order 32GB of ram in one stick instead of a double 16GB. The idea being upgradable proof to 64GB without having to sell a stick in the future. But I don’t want to affect the performance.

So, Is there a performance difference between 1 x 32GB VS 2 x 16GB ?

Thank you

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You cut the bandwidth in half so probably
don’t do it if you care about the igpu performance.

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AMD cpu’s are notorious about wanting both DIMMs occupied. Performance is severely hampered.

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Good to know, thanks to both of you. I’ll opt for a dual stick option then.

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Performance difference? Yes. Will you notice or care? Depends what you do, but probably not.

Should you get one stick or two? My advice would be to get two regardless if it’s 32GB or 64GB. Furthermore, if you know you’re going to want 64GB someday, I’d bite the bullet and just get it all now. I had the exact same thought, and here was my conclusion:

  1. If you just bought one 32GB stick, who knows when you’re ready to upgrade if you’ll be able to find a matching stick. RAM SKU’s don’t seem to live very long. Two years after building my desktop, I can’t find another pair of the same RAM to fill the remaining two slots no matter where I looked!
  2. If you bought 2x16GB only to swap them out for 2x32GB in the future, you’ll probably still have spent as much money as buying 2x32GB now. At best maybe saving a few dollars, and maybe you can sell the old modules for a little bit, but in my opinion, save yourself the effort and just buy once.

Lastly, are you sure you need 64GB? 32GB is still a LOT and unless you have a definite and rather immediate need for more, by the time you actually do need 64, you might also be upgrading your mainboard to one with a different RAM spec, so what you start with now won’t really matter, in which case get 2x16GB and don’t look back!

Wait, was there a question?

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The need of a different RAM spec when upgrading the mainboard is a very good point. I’ll go for 2 x 16GB.

Thanks for your constructive answer OperationCWAL.

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I’m glad you got something out of it! Felt like I was rambling again by about half way through. :face_with_open_eyes_and_hand_over_mouth:

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The [RESPONDED] tag in titles is supposed to signify that a Framework employee has officially responded and is added by moderators.

Having two ram sticks makes it possible to use memory interleaving to double the memory bandwidth, which greatly improves performance, especially in GPU bound applications.

If you are getting a graphics module it doesn’t matter as much (as that has it’s own separate memory), but it still helps.

1 stick has up to 44.8 GB/s of memory bandwidth, 2 sticks has up to 89.6 GB/s of memory bandwidth, the graphics module has up to 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth from it’s own dedicated memory.

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Ah, thank you all for this topic (and responses)! I was just about to create a similar one. My framework 16 is slowly arriving and I plan it to be my last laptop. I know that 32GB of RAM for gaming and other tasks this computer will be performing is big enough for 2024. I also cannot really effort 2 x 32 GB right now.
So,
should I buy 2 sticks of 16 GB and enjoy this additional 10-15 % speed performance? But then if I would like to increase the RAM in the future, it would be much more of a hassle; buy 2 new sticks and sell the old ones.
Or I could buy just one 32 GB stick, but who knows if I would even need 64 GB of RAM in the current configuration? I may just switch to DDR6 or whatever for new generation. And as @OperationCWAL mentioned, I may even not find RAM that will match my 1 stick in the next few years!
Yeah, my mind is clear, 2 x 16 GB RAM is it.