I’m on the fence between 32G or 64G. Wondering if anyone has a huge reason to go one way or the other. I realize with the Intel chip it’s only 4 cores so running a bunch of VM’s isn’t going to happen. I’ll probably multi-boot instead.
I’ve ordered the DIY so I’ve got time to decide. Really glad I found the article about XMP.
Shout out to this community, glad to be a part of it and can’t wait for Batch 3…
I went with single 32GB RAM to keep it easy to upgrade to 64 later with no waste. Tried to keep it simple with flex to grow in the future… that’s about all the logic I applied.
I thought about doing that but don’t you lose the dual channel? Not sure if it’s noticeable with >16G ram.
I don’t think I’ll tax this machine enough to notice with a naked eye, but curious about the technical answer to your question. Might nudge me to add that second chip sooner than later…
I went with 32G (2x16G) because it’s still an upgrade from my previous machine that has 24G and I don’t recall coming anywhere close to max-ing it out. I debated if I should get a single 32G to leave the possibility of upgrading to 64G, but I decided against it in favor of dual channel performance.
I went with 64, I do run/will be running a bunch of VMs. Currently I have windows set to dual (holy typo - what is “dool” booting?) boot with the vm pointed at the bare drive. I am planning to set up Fedora and Manjaro like that as well, but have not yet gotten around to it. The primary os on the machine is Pop!_OS.
I also ended up going for 64. I was thinking of getting less and simply replacing it later, but ultimately decided to avoid the hassle and just get the 64 up front.
I do a lot of development work, so having the extra ram will be very useful regardless.
64 Seems to be the theme…
I suspect people who open this thread might more predisposed to be memory junkies, but I also went for 64GB (got a F4-3200C22D-64GRS kit specifically). I tend to be someone who hordes tabs, and I sometimes run a few virtual machines, and more RAM to act as disk cache is never a bad thing.
Biggest tradeoffs are cost and battery usage. Second one might be a big deal for a laptop.
I went with 32 GB since I’m coming from a machine with 16 GB. Honestly, 16 GB is working pretty well for my usage scenario - no VMs or anything of the sort, just like the extra RAM to be able to have multiple windows / apps open all at once, without worry of slowdowns. I guess me going to 32 GB was just for upgrade / future-proofing purposes.
@speckledsea : Not following. RAM size shouldn’t affect battery life. The battery life is affected by it being DDR4/SODIMM and not soldered on from what I understood. I’ll gladly give that up for the upgradability, although I’m looking at doing the 64G initially so that’s not really a good reason.
The amount of RAM absolutely will affect power consumption a bit. It won’t (appreciably) impact the active power consumption that is caused by memory access, but it will increase the quiescent power that is consumed whether active or idle. The overall power usage from RAM depends on both. Assuming the same RAM chips are used in both cases (not unreasonable from the same line of modules from the same vendor), doubling the amount of RAM will double the idle power consumption of the RAM. That’s not necessarily a huge increase in overall power consumption at idle, but it’s not nothing either.
As an aside being soldered on or not makes relatively little difference inherently. What does make a difference is LPDDR4 vs DDR4 and particularly the fact that the former run at 1.1V rather than 1.2V, and for some reason or another the industry decided to not make LPDDR4 SODIMMS.
@AlexS Thank you for the education. I have never heard of ram noticeably affecting battery runtime. Then again, the way I use my laptop, I always disable suspend/sleep, that may be why.
There are several youtube vids out there with reviews on the FW laptop that mention the soldered vs upgradable ram and power consumption. That’s where I saw it.
It’s no problem, I’m still getting 64… lol.
Yeah, those videos talking about soldered RAM and power consumption would have been referring to LPDDR4 soldered ram specifically.
I’ll also note that more RAM can save some power that would be used by disk activity, by avoiding page file use or allowing more other disk access to be cached. How this weighs against the increased idle power consumption from more RAM will depend on workload (though won’t entirely outweigh it in most cases)
To be honest, the battery life doesn’t bother me. I went for the biggest CPU I could get as well. Honestly, I’m usually near enough to power that as long as the battery lasts me an hour or two it will be sufficient. But yeah, I was prepared to accept a reduced battery life for more power and RAM.
I went duel channel 16 GB. I plan on running Linux and I figure I can do what I need to with 16 GB. The great part is Framework can get upgraded in the future. So should the need arise for more, I could easily add it.
I went with 32GB, 2x16GB at 3200mhz, 1.2V. I have several programs open constantly for research. However if I have to run some data it’s on a server so I didn’t need to go higher. I easily hit the 16GB limit on my old machine.