128 GB RAM on 15" laptop? anyone?

Hi everyone,

It seems current (2021) high-end 15" laptops are ditching the 4-slot standard and moving back to only 2 RAM slots. I am doing 3D numerical simulations (finite elements), and RAM is often a limiting factor.

I tried looking online for 64GB SO-DIMM RAM sticks (1x64GB, *not* 2x32), to no avail. 64GB seems to exist in PC format (DIMM) but not for laptops (SO-DIMM).

Here are the questions:
1) does anyone here know of an upcoming 64 GB laptop (SO-DIMM) RAM stick? Any manufacturer attempting this?
2) Are current laptop motherboards all incompatible with 64 GB RAM sticks? How to know whether they are compatible or not?
3) More generally, have you heard of a 15" (not 17") laptop that would be compatible with 128 GB of RAM, be it 2 or 4 slots?

Thank you in advance.

 

I think you did your research and already know the answer: there are very few 15 inch laptops with 4 SODIMMs, and there are no 64GB laptop modules yet (32GB SODIMMs are fairly recent). One such laptop is Dell Precision 7560 (not to be confused with the 7760 17 inch model)!

 

wat

 

My bad, thanks!

 

ThinkPad T15g and other models from Lenovo too.

 

I believe Sager/Clevo had a BIOS limitation - Making 128GB config possible for upgrades removed some other features.

 

X170 is rocking 128GB in the configurator: https://clevo-computer.com/en/hot-o...0850k-desktop-processor-nvidia-rtx-2080-super

 

yep, Clevo 15 inchers is the way to go here 4x32 GB at 3200 Mhz totally doable, even overclocked to 3400+

 

I would say unless your heavy into CAD/CAM/CAE or Photo drawing or Photography or Multimedia/Music having more Ram doesn't help. Gaming is the only other place More RAM helps but unless your system dedicated having more Ram doesn't equate to better. Also the O/S must be 64bit to use the larger Ram capacity.

 

Have you just arrived from the early 2000s? When was the last time you saw a 32 bit OS?

More RAM is always useful to some extent, since the OS uses is for disk caching. Your list of applications benefiting from large amounts of RAM is quite incomplete, and beside the point since the OP stated he needs 128GB for his scientific application.

 

Windows 10 comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit varieties

14 Linux Distributions You Can Rely on for Your Ancient 32-bit Computer



There are still legacy apps and people that don't give up on HW until it's truly dead.

This is probably 1 reason Windows 11 is requiring TPM to phase out older systems from their support tree once and forever. Not to mention supporting 8th and up Intel CPUs.

However the trade offs aren't really worth sticking with a 32OS.

 

I obciously meant a PC OS used in practice...
64 bit OSes can typically run 32bit applications, as I'm sure you are aware.

Windows 11 is a travesty that is threatening to deprecate 5 years old systems.

 

There's still people running stuff that has been EOL for a decade or more.

If you want to be "current" then there will need to be some updates. Application devs are part of the problem with converting to newer systems. 32 compatibility will be around until OS devs kill off the compatibility option. People and businesses will still run their legacy apps in VMs to keep them until something newer comes along to replace them.

Quicken in particular for me had 86/64 options but, the most recent release that's updated more often when to a single platform option to simplify updates for better performance which doesn't really feel like it's all that much better than the stand alone install they used to use.

Back on topic though.....

I thought 16GB of RAM was the standard for a couple of years and recently went to 32GB because of apps like Chrome that just kept getting more bloated and needed more frequent restarts to clear the buffers or open additional programs smoothly. They recoded Chrome recently and it's quit bloating to infinity which is nice as it consumes a whole lot less space with the same amount of tabs open as before. Before the recode the system would easily exceed 20GB and now it sits around ~13GB typically. Tabs don't crash anymore but, the overall performance boost of more RAM isn't something I notice as I'm already running NVME's for OS / Data. Maybe data transfers between drives picked up a bit as I can now get 1.5GB/s vs before where it would sit around 1GB/s.

If I were running stuff that were more RAM intensive I would be able to clock it better. I suspect if I were running a slower SATA SSD it would use RAM more when moving data around as a cache.