[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch The official spec sheet says only 16GB is supported because the devices were not tested with more memory. I find it a shame that there was no official testing, as a lot of people are asking for this. When the LOQs were first announced, there were a few questions from users about 32GB memory.

Screenshot from the official documentation:


Opening this laptop is a little bit of pain in the butt; there's a black plastic shroud on the back that needs to be removed first, as two of the screws from the backplate are under it. It really does not come off easily. Once that part is done, the access to memory is easy.

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch indeed, it is helpful, especially knowing that the 4800/5200 Mhz limitation is due to the CPU limitations, it would have been possible to go reach those 5600 Mhz with Memory OC options (like XMP), but it's a laptop this is not something we easily find on laptops anyway.

Like always, thanks again to @Saka for all the valuable provided information 😁

[DoctorEldritch]

Originally Posted by Saka

@DoctorEldritch The official spec sheet says only 16GB is supported because the devices were not tested with more memory. I find it a shame that there was no official testing, as a lot of people are asking for this. When the LOQs were first announced, there were a few questions from users about 32GB memory.

Screenshot from the official documentation:


Opening this laptop is a little bit of pain in the butt; there's a black plastic shroud on the back that needs to be removed first, as two of the screws from the backplate are under it. It really does not come off easily. Once that part is done, the access to memory is easy.

@Saka Thank you for this feedback, I forwarded it to the dev team (you remember Sergey Balashov)!
@GoLLuM13 it is impressive how @Saka is so thorough!

[Saka]

@GoLLuM13 @DoctorEldritch Aw, you guys are making me blush.

I do remember Sergey. I am not sure if I remembered to reply in the thread, but I was impressed by his detailed answer regarding the redesigned cooling in the 9i laptop.

I am aware that "16GB is good enough for gaming, unless we count badly optimised new releases that are resource hogs. However, there are some people who also use these laptops as work computers, and then more memory can be fairly important for them. It can be a trivial reason, such as keeping work stuff open and going for a break in a game. Or the work very can be resource-demanding, for example graphics or video editors. There's a fair bit of people who do those without being super tech savvy, so they may be unsure how to upgrade the laptop memory & whether it is possible.

Then there are people like me, who are fairly technical, but for some reason needed a laptop. My reason is the studies I do, I need to be able to do machine learning and then display the results on the campus. Sigh.

And there is my neurospicy brain that gets anxiety when my twenty tabs in the web browser get accidentally closed... 😥

[DoctorEldritch]

It is good when a laptop is flexible in its utility, so it is good to know how far GBs can go, be it for gaming or work.

Originally Posted by Saka

And there is my neurospicy brain that gets anxiety when my twenty tabs in the web browser get accidentally closed... 😥

I know what you mean, I have many tabs open myself and get agitated when they close and can't be opened anymore for some reason.



Luckily, here are some apps for that these days, too:

Not necessarily this one, but there are options to look into and find what's best for you.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch I am late to respond to that, but oh God. I need some bleach for my eyes now. I don't have THAT many of the tabs. I think my hereditary glaucoma may have progressed now.

Did you ever get a response regarding testing the device with more memory?

I was informed this morning, that a second stick was ordered for the laptop. Apparently World of Warcraft is really not happy about running single channel and there were several moments where the fps dropped to 3 fps for a couple of seconds. The game worked perfectly when I played it with two sticks of ram; even the races that I recorded on video are... not quite as smooth currently.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Sorry about that, I should have hidden it behind the spoiler tag or somesuch.

I reached out to the dev team and they told me that LOQs are not tested with more than 16GB. Maybe you can ask for more details next time we have an AMA with them.

Ah, congratulations! From your Black Friday comment, I thought you would need to wait longer, glad that you managed to arrange to get it sooner. 3 fps does sound...less than ideal.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch It's a shame that there won't be testing for larger amounts of memory. It's a commonly asked question about these models. Some games easily cap out the 16GB and actually Hogwart's Legacy had some weird crashes. I should test it again with the 32GB if it behaves now.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka You can test the memory if you want to, that's true. Those who have the know-how and time to do that can, at least, so it's good that you are one of those people.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Yes, but as you can see, the sorry state of my budget is making the testing take really long. I don't know how relevant the test would be early December-ish when the launch of the Intel variant of LOQ15 was late summer.

I would also be only able to test with a single brand of sticks. Memory modules are made by 3 big companies, SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung. In my experience Micron has been a good mix of reliable and affordable, so I generally take those. They all have some difference in the parameters that are not even usually posted for the mortals to know (secondary and tertiary timings). That matters in the edge cases where things may be bordering instability. In the case of laptops, you are tied to what the BIOS allows as the motherboard is proprietary. So you can only try what works, but if your unit doesn't boot, then you are just SOL without options to try.

I have actually altered memory timings on a desktop machine. What I am trying to say is that "memory compatibility" is technically better on desktop systems, because you can basically give the BIOS instructions how to run the memory, rather than hope it figures that out by itself (which can be unreliable).

So without a workshop with parts that would be used for something regardless, little handy-people like me are taking expensive gambles if they have no information regarding testing (capacity, which memory modules etc.)

So far my only cues are that: 1. the laptop does boot with a single stick of 32GB Micron RAM. It does not complete the memory testing with a mix of the original memory (forgot what make, but it was 8GB) and the new stick. 2. wmic memphysical get maxcapacity returns the value for 64GB in kilobytes.