[GTALUG] war story #2: buying RAM

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Nicholas Krause via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

Thanks for thinking about my problem.

| Yes, Hugh will run into problems then of getting that speed. The JEDEC default
| profile is 2400mhz
| from memory.

Yes, that is true of the modules that I bought that claimed to be 
DDR4-3200.  That is in fact what I said in the initial message.

| Not sure how locked the Bios on his Thinkpad is. It seems that
| lots of people are
| reporting XMP enabling not being possible. I don't know why they would lock
| that considering
| RAM Speeds needing XMP for the full speed, for the last decade or so.

This is a ThinkCentre M75s gen 2 Small Form Factor machine.  It takes 
desktop DIMMs, not SODIMMs.

XMP is an overclocking technology from Intel.  One should not need 
overclocking the get the advertised speed.

| Not to mention AMD chips like faster RAM up to 3200mhz from memory. There are
| suppose to be
| performance differences there as well. This seems like a very bad manufacturer
| decision if
| this is occurring with Lenovo Laptops.

This is a bad decision of the RAM vendor: misleading advertising.

The computer does drive DDR4 3200 RAM at 3200: it came with an 8GiB 
DIMM.

Yes, AMD Ryzen processors have traditionally have clocked certain things 
(like the cache) at the same rate as the memory.  That's why I don't want 
to settle for DDR4 2400.

| Hugh, are you just using the ram for web browsing or multitasking? If that's
| the case I don't
| think the 800mhz bulk is going to be a big deal. It's up to you but Ryzen only
| wants faster
| ram when I checked for applications like databases, GPU programming e.t.c. So
| if your fine
| with the lower speed and I'm assuming that's the use case it should be
| alright.

Of course it will be alright: it is replacing a 9 year old computer which 
is still OK.  But I want what I paid for.

Your characterisation of workloads using high physical memory bandwidth is 
a bit odd.