Laptop RAM - Standard vs Premium

Im looking to purchase a laptop from HIDevolution and they offer both standard and premium rams

Premium: G.SKILL Ripjaws, Crucial Ballistix, Corsair Vengeance, Patriot Viper or Kingston HyperX
Standard: Samsung, Crucial, Hynix, Kingston, and other high quality OEM memory

Is there any noticeable advantage to choose premium over standard RAM?

 

Does the notebook give BIOS options to overclock it? What is the price difference between stock/premium?

If you can overclock the RAM, what is the expected performance difference over 'stock'?

 

The notebook im looking for is the gigabyte aero 15 x9
Price difference for a 2x8gb stick is 50USD

They did not provide any details about ram speed/timings, just showed the models of the standard and premium RAMs

 

@Lim Zhi Yang I very much doubt you'll get any meaningful performance difference (1-2%) since your system relies on dgpu. If it was igpu-only or you were benchmarking, faster RAM could make a difference, otherwise it's waste of money.

 

I'm with Starlight5 on this one. For a few more dollars over the 'premium' RAM, I'd rather be looking at 2x 16GB 'standard' sticks instead.

 

Definitely agree with this. 2x 16GB is very worthy investment even for a gaming machine. At least make it 16GB + 8GB, since you're considering investing in RAM anyway.

 

I reckon you can only max out at 2667MHz even on XMP. Choose Crucial 2667 or Samsung 2667 or Hynix 2667Mhz models because all of them use Samsung 1y DRAM anyway! Some show the RAM IC as Samsung/Micron/Hynix..
Normal Sammy 2667MHz CAS 19-19-19-xx. For 2400MHz CAS of Sammy mem IC will be 17-17-17.
Kingston HyperX uses tweaked CAS of same chip to give 16-17-17 or 15-17-17 or 14-17-18 @2667MHz Dual channel.

 

OK thanks for your suggestion, will consider either getting 2x8gb or 2x16gb standard.

Not sure if 32gb is needed as im only using at most 11gb on my desktop currently

 

Then go for 32GB RAM, should be cheap in the long run.

 

Depending on where you live, selling 8GB sticks to exchange them for 16GB in future may put you at financial advantage or disadvantage.

With all due respect to HIDevolution, to be perfectly honest getting the machine configured with single 8GB RAM or 16GB RAM module and purchasing another 16GB yourself is probably the most reasonable route to go, for your wallet.

I generally suggest putting more RAM because even with fast NVME SSD running Windows machine without pagefile makes a difference in responsiveness - nothing beats RAM. Of course it's an edge case, but regardless - more RAM never hurts.

 

11GB out of 16GB? Or out of 32GB RAM?

 

Its probably 11GB of 16GB ie. 4GB free RAM. It is usually high amount of RAM caused by Windows Standbylist bug and once cleared should fall under 8GB. 32GB will certainly help because 16GB is the new normal.

 

Yup it's 11 out of 16gb!
Will there be a difference using 32gb compared to 16 when most of the time I'm not hitting the limit for ram on my desktop currently?

 

Depends on your usage/workflows, of course. But testing with 16GB RAM won't really show you what 32GB RAM will do for you.

Windows is great at managing the RAM for us and will hide as well as it could any physical RAM deficiencies, and it can do that very, very well, btw.

When it is given a modern CPU, as you have in your new Gigabyte Aero 15 X9 (is it the Intel Core i9-8950HK?), then 32GB or more is needed to really make it fly.

You may need to change your workflows to be able to push your new platform too. In time, you will and everything below will feel like a kids toy.

 

More free RAM will give a boost in overall usage and benchmark scores will be higher.
I usually clean out RAM before benching to get best scores.

 

OK thank you all for the suggestions
Will consider but probably will get 32gb!

 

That latter is *not* a good idea. Within either bank of RAM, you always want identical size (perhaps also identical type); the dual-channel RAM allows interleaving (alternating) between the two DIMMs to improve throughput. If the DIMMs don't match in size, the system won't be able to run all of the RAM as dual channel, so at least part of it (and perhaps all) will not be interleaved and will result in worse performance.

Either get 2x8, 4x8, 2x16, 2x16+2x8, or 4x16.

 

If someone already has 16GB, they can add a 8GB stick to have dual channel on up to 16GB of memory. Sure it's not optimal, but if the price of a 16GB stick is too much then there are still some gains to be had.

 

@rlk in addition to @custom90gt remark, dual channel RAM does not provide noticeable difference in many if not most tasks. As with higher frequency RAM, it is mostly important for iGPU - while OP has much more powerful dGPU for graphics-intensive tasks. Of course, unlike higher frequency RAM, there are more tasks that can benefit from dual channel RAM, but that doesn't make 8GB+8GB better than 16GB+8GB.

 

For many CPU intensive tasks, dual channel will help a lot since you are doubling the theoretical memory bandwidth compared to single channel.

 

You can get 24GB or 48GB or similar config with different set of RAM sticks. I found a trick accidentally! If you boot very large ISOs from RAM say Grub or SYslinux based, you need to put biggest RAM stick in Bank 0 or Dimm 0 slot otherwise you'll get a error Insufficient RAM. I'm using 1600MHz and 1333MHz RAM sticks since I felt it was expensive to buy a 1600MHz 5 yrs ago and still my laptop does fine.

 

Thanks for a real-world example of why I always throw/give away the RAM I'm upgrading and put in two new, identical sticks.

Many will never see a reason, but if I see this once, it is one time too many (and yeah, I've seen it a few times on client's systems that I've 'fixed' for them, which they were betting it wouldn't make a difference too - they had actually called to buy a 'reliable' computer with the specs I would provide).

 

Yep, I advise the same way. For people who know tech and exactly know the specific RAM needs, I suggest them mix 'n' match method if you're on short budget or higher import duty or taxes.

 

Certainly you can do that, but you're liable to get inconsistent performance if you have a memory-intensive workload

 

You're right, it may even perform better with 16GB+8GB because of the increase in available ram...

Yes dual channel is great, but it doesn't make a big difference in everything. I'd rather have dual channel than single, but that last 8GB of single channel memory in the above example won't hurt anything.

*on edit*
Here is my example in going from single channel (16GB) to 32GB dual channel. You have to go to the table with the UV+Repaste vs 32GB. There are some good gains to be had in some things for sure (things that depend on memory throughput).

 

True, but the question is where that third 8GB stick is coming from. If it's one you have left over (perhaps because one stick went bad), that's one thing, but I wouldn't go and buy a single stick absent very specific circumstances.

 

The third stick? We were talking about a laptop that came with a single 16GB stick and adding an 8GB stick to enable dual channel on 16GB of the 24GB?

 

Right, my bad...

But I think I'd prefer all the more to stretch for a 16GB rather than buy an 8GB that I'd likely upgrade to a 16GB later.