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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If the RAM timings are not exactly the same, you’re going to have instability issues. This is why ts 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
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.
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.
