I have a e14 Thinkpad gen 5 Intel 1335u with 8gb soldered ram and a 8gb 3200 ddr4 stick. 16 is not enough ram for my use as a developer so I put a 16gb stick in knowing only first 16 will run dual channel. Now my computer crashes randomly with high memory usage… read online that a 32gb is more stable single channel but I’m skeptical. Stability is pretty important to me as this is how I earn a living what do you all think? Also I would just buy a 32 and try it but everything got pricey the last 2 month
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I’m running 8 and 32 in my T490, seems to work fine. I’m building software and leaking memory like crazy and it’s never been weird. I don’t see why 8 + 32 would be any different than 8 + 16 other than capacity.
Doesn’t the channel balance not matter that much? Like operations can be done in parallel. I always thought the benefits came from reading different things from each ram chip not synchronizing them byte for byte.
Also, what do you mean by crashes? Kernel panic? Random app death because the oom killer was activated should be expected when pushing the memory limits on Linux.
I have an asus laptop with same config but instead of 8Gb soldered I have 4 Gb soldered and I have a 16Gb ram stick.
Also can you set required freq, also I didn’t have that option so both of ram works at 2400Mhz instead of 3200Mhz.
good to know
There’s no reason why a 32 gig stick of ram should be less stable than an 8. Your ram is defective. Ask for a replacement.
yea it’s a 16gb but yea I agree. although it was in my server for 3 years(laptop that cooked itself)! Going to run memtest here in a minute and will post my findings on all sticks I have around once I’m done with work
Wait… It’s a used stick? For future reference, that’s a key piece of information. I’m guessing it had a life before it was a server, making it older than 3 years. Depending on the history of the old laptop, I’d guess there’s a solid chance that stick is just worn out.
haha used is an understatement. was in a gaming laptop running frigate at like 90 degrees for 3 years. the other stick is a crucial 2666 16gb I have from same laptop. I’m too lazy to run memtest when I know there’s an issue. going to try slower speed and do the testing
I used 20GB (4+16) for a while without issues. Just get another 16GB, if you can afford it XD
And yes agree, 16GB is kinda needed for modern Linux systems and normal to complex software workloads
I’d disagree on the 16GB part. It’s nice to have, but I think 8GB is perfectly fine for most non-gaming use cases. Heck, a couple years ago, I used a laptop from 2010 with 4GB quite comfortably.
I mean, get at least 16GB if you can, especially in a dev setup, but 8 GB hasn’t murdered that many people yet.
In my experience that is not really true. If you use Flatpaks (for recent versions and sandboxing), a browser with many tabs, unoptimised RAM eating electron apps like Signal Desktop, and then have a couple of things like Syncthing and some programs to share Linux ISOs running in the background, stuff gets tight quickly.
I would then also play a video in MPV and maybe encode one with ffmpeg, then oomd comes and kills apps, after my system was frozen for multiple minutes.
will try with a different brand and speed and runs tests thank you!
Reseat the stick you installed and run memtest 86.
It’s more likely that you have a badly installed stick or a faulty stick than consumer memory controllers in the last 20 years care about the installed memory being the same.
You should really optimize the software that you’re developing if 16gb is not enough
haha not only do I use IDEs, docker, etc I also use the computer for computer things at the same time! Like music, browser tabs, and thunderbird eat 3gb ish and gnome alone is about 3
Side note, I hope you’re making use of zram!
I have an E16 gen 1 AMD that I run in a similar configuration- 8 GB soldered + 16 GB SODIMM. I’ve had no problems.
I’d recommend what others have suggested - try reseating the RAM and run a memory test. Also, what distro are you using, not that it’ll necessarily help.
ubuntu fresh 24.04 install. also it’s still usable as is but crashes before I hit 24gb usage
I don’t like Ubuntu, but objectively, this is probably a hardware issue and not a software issue.
I mean, you can try another distro to be sure, but the chances of it solving the issue are slim.
I have a e14 Thinkpad…with 8gb soldered ram
so I put a 16gb stick in
What?
yes 8gb soldered. with a slot for a stick alongside the soldered shit. look I don’t come up with this stuff but I got the laptop for 200 bucks on Facebook and it plays well with ubuntu
Interesting, I’ve never seen or heard of that before…
Lenovo started doing it right after they jumped the shark and started heavily cost-reducing the Thinkpad line.
One reason why I stay far, far away from newer Thinkpads. It is a shame, because the whole line used to be solid and easy to work on.
IBM did the same thing 25 years ago on the Thinkpad 600 series.
Yeah, that’s fair. The T-series in particular was solid for so long though. Until it wasn’t.
I’m pretty happy with my P14s (essentially a T14). It’s even worse in that all the RAM is soldered, but as I understand things, AMD had legitimate performance reasons for doing so, and the trend is likely to continue.
That may be. And it’s not like RAM goes bad constantly when it’s soldered to the board.
At least it is all soldered: having a slot available and never being able to match what is soldered in sounds like my OCD’s worst nightmare.
I do like the P series. For as much as I use a laptop (modulo my work laptop, which I don’t own), I’m still on my trusty T440p, which I have modded as much as humanly possible.
neither had I and I got such a good deal I did not dig into that much before I purchased. I have been through the ringer with laptops the last couple years and dumped so much into new ones that break and the parts are too expensive that I gave up and just go based upon price not specs. would love to have a dedicated desktop but I have to work on the go all the time
I’d give going back to 2666 Mhz a shot. Might gain some stability if the timings are clashing.
I will try this as well, I have 2 16gb sticks kicking around the 3200 team group and a crucial 2666.
gotcha it is a team group one(I was skeptical too) I have another 16gb that is crucial I think but it’s 2666 speed. Will try memtest tonight and report back.
No reason to be skeptical, teams and groups are very trustworthy so teamgroup is a lock.
If the RAM timings are not exactly the same, you’re going to have instability issues. This is why it’s always recommended to install pairs of the same exact model and brand, the clock timings.
I doubt that BIOS is going to give you the specs you need, but somewhere you’ll likely be able to find the timings and compatible memory for this machine. You’ll generally need something faster than what’s installed so it can step it’s timings down to be more in sync.
Any reasonably modern memory controller will clock the memory at the slowest one in dual channel. This hasn’t been an issue for decades.
You know, I had the same thought/opinion on Sunday before I spent 4 hours trying random combinations of leftover ram before I found a combo that would boot on my am4 board. Up to 48GB ram on my server now
The memory controller is part of the CPU, you probably need a new one.
Maybe, but it seems to be fine with matched speed ram. I think my issue at least is due to it being 1st Gen Ryzen. Originally on 32GB 2133mt/s, upgraded to 48GB 3200. Some light reading in-between switching ram sticks suggested not mixing G1 (2133,2400,2666,2933) & G2 (3000, 3200, 3600+) ddr4. And that is what my, testing found. Again, could just be 1st Gen issues tho.
1st Gen. Ryzen had the worst memory controller known to man. What made it worse is that memory speed dramatically affected performance on those CPUs. Anything over 2133 was a blessing.
That makes sense. They (AMD) had the right idea I guess, just didn’t quite nail it in the first try.
100% untrue. While a North Bridge controller can detect and attempt to set the clock frequency, there is absolutely no way to tell if both pieces of a mismatched pair will actually support the timings suggested or set by the controller, which will almost certainly default to whatever the on-board memory supports.
That along with the unknowns of whether it attempts to set channel ranks, which is almost certainly NOT an option to manually configure in a Thinkpad.
Not sure where you heard otherwise, but you’ve been misinformed.
This machine is also working with memory soldered on the board which comes with a whole host of other unknowns, which is why you look up what the timings are first and attempt to match that.
