Lenovo Legion 5 - Single 16Gb or 2 x 8Gb?

Draeger · 16 May 2022 at 15:01

Hi all,

I bought my son a Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop for Christmas last year and he loves it, he would like to increase the RAM in it which was 8Gb DDR4 3200 when it shipped from the factory. I'm unsure if its currently sat with 2 x 4Gb modules or 1 x 8Gb but I will check.

I was thinking of going for a single 16Gb module to put in there and move the existing single 8Gb (if it is indeed the case its a single 8Gb module presently in there) to the other slot giving him 24Gb to utilise. Bit out of the loop on memory, is it recommended to use single sticks of 16Gb rather than two 8Gb sticks? My thought process is that at a later date he might want to pick up a second 16Gb single stick to give him 32Gb all told?

Any guidance appreciated

throwaway4372 · 16 May 2022 at 15:03

what matters is you want the ram running in dual channel
sometimes when there's one stick it's because the other half is soldered onto the motherboard
maybe cpu-z can tell you

Tetras · 18 May 2022 at 00:14

Draeger said:
Hi all,

I bought my son a Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop for Christmas last year and he loves it, he would like to increase the RAM in it which was 8Gb DDR4 3200 when it shipped from the factory. I'm unsure if its currently sat with 2 x 4Gb modules or 1 x 8Gb but I will check.

I was thinking of going for a single 16Gb module to put in there and move the existing single 8Gb (if it is indeed the case its a single 8Gb module presently in there) to the other slot giving him 24Gb to utilise. Bit out of the loop on memory, is it recommended to use single sticks of 16Gb rather than two 8Gb sticks? My thought process is that at a later date he might want to pick up a second 16Gb single stick to give him 32Gb all told?

Any guidance appreciated

Intel systems are usually fine with that, not sure about AMD systems. Mismatching is not recommended though. Does it have any support for XMP and voltage adjustment, or is that a JEDEC spec stick?

Draeger · 18 May 2022 at 07:54

Cheers, guys. I'll have a look at the laptop and see what's in there at the moment. It's an AMD Ryzen I believe, spec below:-

Lenovo Legion 5 Notebook 39.6 cm (15.6") Full HD AMD Ryzen™ 7 8 GB DDR4-SDRAM 512 GB SSD NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) Windows 10 Home Black, Blue AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (8C/16T, 3.2/4.4GHz, 4MB L2/16MB L3), 1x 8GB SO-DIMM DDR4-3200

The single 16Gb was my preference, simply so that at a later date I could add another 16Gb matched module from the same manufacturer. But would it be better to grab 2 x 8Gb matched RAM modules or can I add another 8Gb of the same spec if its better not to run a single 16Gb module?

Ta.

Tetras · 18 May 2022 at 15:23

Draeger said:
The single 16Gb was my preference, simply so that at a later date I could add another 16Gb matched module from the same manufacturer. But would it be better to grab 2 x 8Gb matched RAM modules or can I add another 8Gb of the same spec if its better not to run a single 16Gb module?

Unfortunately it is just "try it and see". Memory manufacturers will all tell you to buy matched sticks on the QVL (or recommended by their configurator). I've done it a fair bit because I find matched pairs too limiting (I always tried to match the memory chips, even if the speeds were different) and no issues so far running at JEDEC speeds (2133, 2400 or 2666), but obviously there's no guarantee.