Macbook pro takes 16GB Ram - Why doesn't the X220 ?

The new Macbook pro (i5 & i7) is able to take 16GB Ram (2 x 8GB sticks). I know the new ram is too expensive to consider, but why doesn't the X220 (also i5 & i7) accept that much ram?

Did Lenovo put a cap on the ram, even though Intel supports it?

 

The X220 probably will take 16GB, but Lenovo hasn't validated it with 8GB sticks since they're crazy expensive and hard to find (Newegg doesn't even stock them).

This is similar to how Lenovo only lists certain SSDs as being compatible with the T420. Any 2.5"/9.5mm SSD should work, but Lenovo can only guarantee that it will work with the drives that they have actually tested.

Note that the X220 (and the T420s) take 2.5"/7mm drives, so most SSDs/HDDs won't fit. The Intel X25-M G2 is a notable exception since it is a 7mm drive once you remove the plastic spacer.

 

Yup 8GB sticks cost about 2 grand a pop...so does it matter that a MBP can take 16 GB RAM lol.

 

What exactly do you plan to do with this laptop that would need 16gb of memory?

PS: Why did i just laugh about the idea of apple saying..it can support 16gb of memory..then they recommend it..i wonder how many would do so..ah ok enough jokes..

 

16gb of ram is well past the amount of load average workstation laptops can handle. We handle heavy ram intensive cad at work and our workstations hit 8-11gb and that's enough to bog down an core i7 950 machine. So why on Gods green earth would you want that in an average laptop let alone an ultraportable????

 

Just looking for a video editing solution with premiere pro:

* tower vs notebook (with a vidock & monitor)

... but $1600 for 16GB ram from OWC is WAY too expensive.

 

Virtual Machines.

 

By the time you are using all 16 gigs of ram in the current MBP, it will probably shutting itself off from overheating. MBP are not designed for serious CPU intensive tasks.

 

My job involves writing natural language processing systems using machine learning, and I absolutely appreciate having 16GB of memory in my desktop (i7-2600 / 4GB x 4). When you're writing code that processes gigabytes of text, the classification models can get huge. So you either write your code to be more efficient, or you do what I do and just throw more RAM at the problem.

As soon as 8GB SO-DIMMs come down in price I'll have 16GB on my laptop too. And possibly 32GB of memory on my desktop. You can never have too much RAM.

 

Macbook Pro only advertise that it can take up to 8gb.

from Apple.com

They both advertise that they only take 8gb, that does not mean the board can't take 16gb

 

I'm guessing the X220 would overheat as well. I'm not interested in the MBP

 

and what are you basing your guess on that the x220 would overheat, pray tell?

on a side note: it would be interesting if the x220 can handle 16GB. sure, the pricing is prohibitedly expensive now but prices on such high density ram do eventually come down. might take a while though.

 

Given past experiences with Thinkpads, it is most unlikely.

 

if you can afford the 2x 8GB DDR3 SODIMMs, the X220 will run them.

regarding all the memory comments, if this discussion were had on a workstation forum, no one would think twice about 16GB, 32GB, 96GB, or even 192GB in their system.   fwiw, i've had 16GB in my thinkstation since i got it three years ago and am badly due for a memory upgrade.   three years ago everyone thought 4GB in a notebook was "too much" memory.   some of us thought it wasn't enough.

do you think your favorite 3D IMAX movies are rendered on systems with only 8GB?   probably... not.

 

Then again, do you think your favorite 3D IMAX movies are rendered on one single computer? probably... not. Pretending that one can take on all of the world's computing problems by upgrading one computer (a laptop, no less) to the gills is a little silly to me.

I understand that some people use their computers to do serious work that requires lots of power instead of playing games and browsing the web. However, if you are one of those people, you should be thinking about how to set up a serious computing infrastructure to maximize your ROI, and I wager that, once you have done your homework, upgrading your laptop to 16GB RAM (now or 3 years later) would not be at the top in your list of options.

Just saying,

 

Yeah, that's pretty much what I think too.

I'm running a Server 2008 R2, 3 Linux distros and a few W7's in VMWare parallel cross-platform developing environment on my HP8740w (WinPro7 is the host OS)and it hasn't gone past 8GB out of the 16GB installed. Add to this a disabled page file.



On a side note, with the looming DDR4 launch the prices will go down, so I don't really see any problem here

 

Unless of course you need to take it with you and demonstrate something to a customer. Serious computing infrastructure is fine, but I don't always have high speed access to the data center.

Some of us have done plenty of homework and built some of the largest data centers on this planet.

Just saying.

And I have a single SharePoint VM with a 8GB allocation. What's your point? Are you saying when I am running several VM's and using nearly all of my 16GB I don't know what I'm doing. Please.

Let's stop telling people how to spend money on their technical requirements. Some of us actually need more than 16GB so I'm already looking forward to doubling the amount of RAM when the price becomes within reach.

I know an army of consultants in the same boat.

 

I'll probably get the i3, IPS screen, with 9 volt battery, and spend the rest on a serious workstation. But first it will be good to see reviews and feedback for the entire range once they're released.

 

Why so angry? Nobody says you don't know what you're doing. You can put a 32GB system on its knees with certain tasks.
And nobody's telling you how to spend your money. BTW, if each 8GB stick costs ~1-2k, why not buy a laptop with 4 memory slots and have a far more powerful machine with 16GB of RAM for less money than your upgrade cost?? Or is the x220 a part of your technical requirements?
And sorry if I offended you in some way, didn't really mean to hurt anyone's feelings or doubt their professional expertise.

On a side note, please try using the "multi quote" and "edit" buttons to combine your posts so it won't look like you're spamming.

 

He is not angry he is probably finding your posts to be a bit silly.

He told you how virtual machines could easily run past 8gb of ram, in fact they do specially if you are running multiples and each is being used. Add in server+VM+usage of the machine as a workstation and you can easily find yourself running 32gb of ram or higher.

I myself was running 12GB of ram on my Dell M6500 (4 ram slots, otherwise 12gb would have not been an option) before I sold it so I could keep up with certain video projects. I was hitting around 9.7 gbs-10gb of ram usage without having to do VM/ other tasks just with SC2 (3gb), CS4 Premiere (6~- Hell if I remember much much this took), aftereffects (8~) and a few other programs (CS4 Photoshop etc).g.

 

I carried 2-3 machines everywhere I went for several years. I don't want to go back to that if I can avoid it. If I was driving, it's no big deal but flying with several machines sucks. One powerful machine is preferred.

I didn't even know you COULD multi quote until now. Guess I never paid close attention to that button.

Water under the bridge. Your quote made it sound like those of us with 16GB of RAM are insane and wasting money. Maybe some people are, but a bunch of folks I know aren't. We can use as much memory as we can get. We are however insane.

Peace.

 

Yeah, I totally understand the need for one powerful machine, traveling constantly myself.
As far as I know there are plenty of relatively lightweight 15" notebooks that have 4 slots of RAM, dedicated graphics, quad core CPU. For under 2k total, you can have 16GB RAM, i7-quad + quadro/firepro. And if I may further express my opinion, running a complex VM environment might be less convenient on a 12.5" screen. My primary laptop has a 17" (1920x1200) and I find it hard to maneuver on smaller panels.

Your machine had much more powerful components. Would you run all of it on a 12.5" screen and Intel IGP?

 

Obviously not, however there are still many tasks that can take up said ram, even on the 12" X220%.

Oh and btw I dont know if the OP knew this but last I checked only the i7 quad core MBP's can take 16gb of ram. The i5 or i7 dual cores cannot.

 

I think you misunderstood me cause I jumped into this thread due to the discussion around memory. I have a W510. It has 16GB of RAM.

I don't think the X220 will ever make it to my stable of machines. The 12.5" IPS panel is interesting, but that's about it. My next IW machine will likely be the T420s with the 1600x900 panel, Sammy NP900X3A-A03US (with TPM), or ThinkPad X1.

But thanks for the recommendation...

 

Lol, nice. I rest my case.

 

Understandable. But by the time you utilize that much ram with VMs the rest of the hardware will not be able to keep up. If youre going to do this on a laptop a quad core is a must if it needs to be stable.

Thats fine, but utilizing that much ram will far exceed the rest of the hardware in the x220.

This is NOT what I was saying at all. I know there are needs past a certain amount of ram, hell we use 12GB at work now and Im thinking about doubling that within the year. Just saying utilizing this much ram in an ultraportable just isnt practical.

I think youre the only one who understood my post at all.

For the record everyone Im not saying that its too much ram and that nobody could ever use that much. Im saying that when that much or close to that much ram is utilized it will be too much for the rest of the hardware in the x220. Its an ultraportable not a workstation. If you want to utilize that much ram I would suggest at least a mid level quad core cpu. Thats if you want a stable and smooth or semi smooth running box.

 

The x220 has a Sandy Bridge CPU and it can (and will) turbo to 3.4GHz for single-threaded workloads. If your workload is single or lightly threaded it is as fast as any Core i7/i5/i3 system from the previous generation.

Besides that, have you ever considered that my workload is data intensive and not compute intensive? Having 16GB means that I can hold my entire classification model in RAM without swapping to disk or having to get creative with compression or other tricks. If I had 32GB I could train on even more data without running into that limit. Our compute server has 48GB of memory for that very reason, but it's not always convenient to run on a remote machine.

RAM is different from CPU performance. Having a (same clock/architecture) dual-core CPU instead of a quad-core CPU might mean that your computation takes anywhere from the same amount of time (if it's not well-threaded) to almost twice as long (if it is well-threaded). Having 8GB of RAM instead of 16GB of RAM means that I need to use a classifier that's half as large, or it means that I end up swapping to disk (SSD in my case) and an 30-minute task takes days.

I would have 16GB in my Core 2 Duo T400 if it weren't stupidly expensive. Yeah, it's still going to be way slower than my i7-2600 desktop. So is everything on the market. But being able to do a job in twice as long when I'm away from my desktop is a hell of a lot better than not being able to do it in any reasonable amount of time, or having to reduce the complexity/performance of my classifier to lower RAM usage.

 

Don't think your T400 will support 16 GB of ram.

 

The Sandy Bridge dual-core in the X220 is quite a bit faster at single and dual-threaded tasks than the quad-core mobile i7 from the last generation. Even on highly threaded tasks an i7-2620M can be quite competitive with (for example0 an i7-720QM.

That may sound hard to believe but it's not hard to understand why: the i7-2620M has a huge clock advantage (2.7GHz vs. 1.6Ghz) and has the architectural improvements of Sandy Bridge as well which delivers higher IPC.

The Intel IGP obviously sucks for serious gaming and CAD/CAM. But there are a lot of us whose work doesn't benefit from the GPU at all.

Hell, Eclipse alone can easily suck up 4GB of memory on my machine. And I do keep VMs running at low load a lot of the time - for development, testing, and other purposes.

I want to be able to have VS, Eclipse, a couple of VMs with 2GB of memory each, Chrome with a ton of tabs, a local MySQL instance, background programs (backup, antirvrius, etc.), and whatever else I happen to be working on open at the same time. It's not strictly necessary, but it sure is convenient. And why the hell not on an X220? Reality dictates that I can't get a 17" screen in a small laptop. Cooling and power consumption mean that I'm not going to get a quad-core CPU. But I *can* still get a CPU that's faster than anything we had in laptops - even workstation laptops - in 2009. And I can still get lots of memory. And thanks to SSDs, I can still get fast storage.

I'm not going to get 16GB in my X220, I'm going to keep the 8GB I have in my T400. But that's because 8GB SODIMMs are insanely expensive and hard to find. It's the same reason I didn't get 8GB when I purchased my T400. Once 8GB SODIMMS have dropped to $100 or so each I'll pop two in.

Probably true. It's not something I would test since I'm not about to spend $4k on memory for a computer that's maybe worth $500.

 

why not?   what's the limitation?

 

Because my friend already tried it in his X200 and T500, it didn't work. It was a Samsung version, the laptop didn't even boot when the modules were inserted. Not sure whether this is a issue with the samsung ram or something. I guess more people can try it out using other brands.

 

Cool so one of your many VMs OR your host OS can function well while the rest suffer horribly. OK I can see some one setting a task and forgetting it overnight it may work, but again I would never use an ultraportable meant for different tasks as a workstation with those kinds of uses. Sure there are people like you who can find this useful, but still data intensive will be somewhat CPU intensive as well. If this is the way you want to go then by all means. To me using an ultraportable for these tasks seems like a test in futility...

LoL thinking of that much ram in my t400 makes me giggle. Although even with all my VMs all on one machine I still wouldnt need that much. Heck my win7 VM runs on 512mb and does everything I need smoothly. Sure I could set it at a higher level, and probably should. But when I used it for a testbed to test what I needed and wanted the initial tests works so well I kept it running.

 

Because they are two different brands that are not connected.

Renee

 

what is the samsung part number your friend tried?   did either of you take any photos?   this seems a rather newsworthy event that one would want to brag about, no?

 

Ya, pics or it didn't happen.

 

nope i was overseas, this ram was from a mate of his whom is a computer reseller, which was imported from Korea. He sent me an email saying that it could be an engineering sample of some sort, since the person whom gave the ram to him got it for like 300 USD equivalent.

I had a another shot at my Thinkcentre S10 and single stick of 4 gigs of DDR3 ECC ram, that failed too.

@halobox, i am here to inform not to brag. You can obviously buy a single stick of ddr 3 ram and try it.

 

Brag? Me?

 

Why did you choose Vertex 3 drives with inferior nand.
Should of gone C300 or something with better quality control, and reputation.
edit: yes I know it was a joke

 

The chipset obviously supports 8GB SO-DIMMS - so it's a BIOS support question, isn't it? IIRC my Dell D630 didn't support 4GB modules at launch, but this was fixed with a BIOS update. Maybe even 16GB modules are possible, unless the DDR3 spec requires them to be ECC.

I dual boot Win7 and 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V on said D630. The relatively slow CPU is much less of a problem than lack of RAM. There are loads of things which I need to test where each VM needs >4GB yet the CPU load is pretty low.

I will soon need a laptop capable of being upgraded to 16GB RAM, and all the 4 slot machines are just too heavy. X220 looks almost perfect; although ideally I'd like something around the same weight, slightly bigger screen @ 1080p, and with >16GB RAM capability - like a Vaio Z with 4 slots. Such a machine doesn't exist, but X220 may be the nearest thing when I'm due for an upgrade (3-6 months).

If any of you get a X220 and run Hyper-V with Aero - would be grateful if you could post your experiences.

 

Hands down. You're in the same situation as I am right now. I'm currently using 15" MBP 2010 version and it lacks of ram support (8 gigs to the max - well the 620M is lacking aswell). If you found any viable solution for 16 GB with a quad core that can handle stuff I'd apreciate your feedback.

 

FWIW, I did try installing Corsair 16GB into my updated x220. It was recognized fine but the fans were for some reason overworking and in a few minutes I got a BSOD in Win32k.sys. After that I received 5 more - after which I was fairly certain it wasn't going to work. I am back to my original 8Gb sticks and all is well.

tl;dr : x220 might take and recognize 16GB RAM but it might not work reliably. Hope this helps someone.

 

blinkingled - welcome to the forum!

you might want to try different modules.   many users, myself included, have had success with 16GB in the X220.   corsair is notorious for incompatibility issues in many, many systems.   i wouldn't draw a broad conclusion based on an isolated incident.

two modules that i know will work are the samsung M471B1G73AH0-CH9 and elpida EBJ81UG8BAS0-DJ-F.   each of these are used by lenovo in the X1.   all sandy bridge CPU offerings in the X220 have been updated by intel to reflect 16GB compatibility so there's no reason why you can't make it work with the right parts.

in fact, anything on this list should work without issue: http://download.intel.com/technology/memory/SODIMM_1600_1.5v_111011.pdf

 

@erik - thanks much for the detailed response. I have sent the Corsair modules back as defective (Newegg charged me $28 restocking fee!).

Any idea where I can buy the compatible Samsung modules? I found one here @ Memory4less - never heard of them before.

 

Get low density RAM for it to work, btw I was able to 6GB DDR2 on a Thinkpad R61 was only suppose to run up 4GB, the lower the density the higher chances you can get your wish of running that type of amount of RAM.

 

My Crucial 8GB x 2 = 16GB works fine in my X220 without any glitch or bsod though.

 

You think that type of RAM would work on a T500 or T510? Just curios

 

I don't think ThinkPad is very picky with RAM. Just try anything you could get, run memtest86+ for at least 2 passes, then prime95 for several hours with all memory used, then LinX for several hours with all memory used, and it's good to go

 

the T500 will not accept 8GB modules where the T510 will.   in the case of the question being asked above, thinkpads are very picky with RAM.

 

So there are other brands of laptops that can accept 8GB modules with a Core 2 CPU / chipset? I don't think this has anything to do with ThinkPad

 

it has nothing to do with thinkpads specifically.   compatibility with older models was the point being clarified so that others don't read your post and buy memory thinking it will work.

and, considering that one member above had bad luck with 2 x 8GB corsair modules in his X220, i'd say thinkpads definitely can be picky with RAM.