Last year I discovered that some gaming laptops were being sold with slower x16
memory. This resulted in lower FPS for games compared to faster x8 memory which
had been more popular until 2021, our great year of supply shortages.
Linus even made a video covering the topic and gave credit to my
initial game benchmarks showing the differences.
Long story short, it was possible to boost performance quite a bit in
some games with DDR4 laptops by upgrading from x16 sticks to x8 sticks, and I demonstrated this
in a number of laptops including the Legion 5 Pro and ASUS Scar 15 Advantage Edition.
But is this still the case for newer gaming laptops with newer DDR5 memory?
The results actually weren't what I was expecting!
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and now back to the RAM comparison.
Just like last year, gaming laptops are still only advertised with basic memory information.
Take this Legion 5i Pro for example, all we know when looking at the product page is that we’re
getting 16 gigs of DDR5-4800 memory. You’ve got no idea about ranks, banks, timings or anything else.
To be fair, this information is probably a bit too technical for most people anyway, but it
would still be great to have that information available somewhere for those that want it.
Now to Lenovo’s credit, they do actually maintain a detailed parts list. You can look
up all the parts used by a specific model and even find images that contain specific memory
part numbers to search for further details. Right now though they don’t have pictures of
the memory that came in my 5i Pro. It is a very new model so maybe it just needs to be updated.
Regardless, this is something that most other companies don’t have, but it still has its limits.
Although we can see the different types of RAM that might be used,
we don’t actually have any idea of what we’ll get in the specific laptop that we buy. As we
just saw for the 5i Pro in particular, there were a number of different parts listed for
the memory. Am I going to get the same memory in this laptop if I buy it here in Australia?
What about in the US or in the UK? What about from different stores? What if I buy in 6 months time?
Last year, people in different regions reported getting x8 or x16 memory in the same laptop,
it seemed to vary depending on what country they bought from. At the end
of the day it just seemed like it was luck of the draw, and this was clearly problematic.
Because if I get sent a gaming laptop that has faster x8 memory and most people buy it
with x16 then the benchmarks that I’m showing aren’t going to be applicable to most of you.
Now I also want to be clear, although I’m using Lenovo as a specific example,
this isn’t something that’s unique to them. Last year I found the slower x16
memory in a number of gaming laptops from a number of different brands including ASUS,
Acer, HP, and even some of Alienware’s high end expensive models.
Ultimately these companies can only buy the memory that’s actually available in the market.
It’s not as if they make it themselves. They’ve all been subject to part shortages far more than
you or me. The only reason I’m using Lenovo’s Legion 5i Pro to do this
testing is because it’s the first new gaming laptop I’ve received with DDR5 x16 memory.
And it was the Legion 5 Pro last year where I first experienced DDR4
x16 memory and found that it was slower than x8, so I figured that this was a
great opportunity to follow up and find out if DDR5 memory makes as big of a difference.
This is the stock memory that came in my Legion 5i Pro by default,
16 gigs of CL40 DDR5-4800 single rank x16 memory.
And now this is the memory that I changed to in order to see if there’s
a performance difference. It’s also CL40 DDR5-4800 single rank memory, but it’s x8.
This x8 memory is also a 32 gig kit compared to the 16 gig kit that came in my 5i Pro,
so the upgrade is also double the capacity. Now before you start screaming that this isn’t
a fair comparison, this just seems to be how DDR5 memory is right now.
I’ve been told that all 8 gigabyte DDR5 SODIMM laptop sticks are x16 while only
the 16 gig sticks and above are x8, so that would mean that this is the only we can do
this comparison. Now I can’t say just how completely true this information is,
but if we take a look at the DDR5 laptop SODIMM sticks currently available from either Crucial or
SKHynix, it does indeed appear to be the case. At least right now in early 2022.
While this might still not sound fair due to the capacity difference,
I’ve already shown in this video here that it doesn’t really seem to affect
gaming as long as you’ve got more than 16 gigs in dual channel. So I don’t think the
differences between 16 gigs and 32 gigs of DDR5 memory are going to play that big,
if any role in our game comparisons. We should be seeing the results between x8 and x16, if any.
Anyway that’s more than enough explanation. We’ve tested 10
games at 2 different resolutions to show you all of the differences.
Let’s start out with Forza Horizon 5. We’ve got results with the native 2560
by 1600 screen resolution above, and we’ve also tested at 1080p below. Both were done because
memory differences usually matter more at lower resolutions, and I wanted this data
to be applicable to other laptops as well. Not just the 5i Pro with its above 1440p
screen. Anyway at 1080p we’re seeing just a 4% boost with x8 memory with basically
no change at the higher resolution, a little extra in the 1% lows with x8 but that’s it.
I was really keen to see the Shadow of the Tomb Raider results, because this game
shows some of the biggest differences when it comes to memory. Although last year there was a
12% performance boost at 1080p by swapping from x16 to x8 memory on the Strix G15,
we’re seeing basically no difference here with DDR5.
Far Cry 6 was kind of weird. The average FPS was basically the same regardless of memory,
however the 1% lows at 1080p were far lower compared to the x16 stock memory that just
came in the 5i Pro. Not sure what the deal was here, but this is the only time anything like
this happened in a consistently reproducible way so it seems like a bit of an outlier.
Rainbow Six Siege had the biggest difference out of all 10 games tested,
with a massive 4% higher average FPS at 1080p. Alright I’m being a bit sarcastic there,
but there just aren’t huge differences with DDR5.
CS:GO also had above average gains with the x8 memory at 1080p, but it’s margin
of error stuff and when you’re above 500 FPS I’d argue this doesn’t really matter.
Red Dead Redemption 2 had a massive 1 FPS difference
in either direction depending on the resolution, so nothing serious here.
God of war was similar at 1080p, while the higher resolution was a couple of FPS ahead
with the stock memory - a small trend that we’ll see through most of the games tested.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was about the same at either resolution,
like a 1 FPS difference best case, big deal.
Cyberpunk 2077 almost had a 3 FPS gain at 1080p with x8 memory, a 3% gain, and this
was the third best improvement with x8 memory. It really doesn’t seem like it matters here.
Watch Dogs Legion saw the biggest difference in a bunch of games in the big RAM comparison
I did a few months ago, linked below the video, so I figured it would be a good one to test all
the different setting presets with. Generally we’d expect the memory difference to have
a bigger effect at lower setting levels, and yeah sure while the x8 memory in the red bars
was further ahead at low settings compared to ultra, we’re talking about a 3% gain,
nothing major. Interestingly the higher resolution actually had higher gaps at
the higher setting presets, but again best case we’re still talking about a 3-4 FPS difference.
Not exactly a change that’s worth buying new memory for and smaller compared to DDR4.
All testing up until now has been done with optimus disabled for best performance
as the 5i Pro offers this feature, so to see if the integrated graphics behave
differently we’ve also tested one game with optimus on. To be fair
we are seeing a slightly larger difference compared to with optimus off, which at 1080p
only saw the x8 memory 1 frame higher than x16, but still this is only a relatively
small 3% boost. Not quite the 10% boost in the same game with last year’s DDR4 Legion 5 Pro.
These are the average differences out of all 10 games tested at the lower 1080p resolution.
On average we’re looking at less than a 2% FPS boost with the x8 memory, basically
nothing at all. Best case we’re barely seeing a 4% gain in Rainbow Six Siege,
and given that one was above 300 FPS, does it really matter? The difference is so small
that it even confirms the size difference of 16 gigs versus 32 gigs doesn’t matter.
We're just not seeing enough of any sort of difference here to make a ram upgrade worth it.
Things change a bit at the higher native 2560 by 1600 resolution. The memory difference should
matter less at the higher resolution as we’re more GPU bound, and that seems to be the case as on
average there’s a smaller gap. There was actually a slight trend towards the x16 memory doing better
here, but it’s a very small difference either way at less than 3% towards either option.
Despite the difference in games not being much at all, the latency reported by the
Aida64 cache and memory benchmark was a fair bit different. The x8 memory was around 10% faster
in this regard. Read and write speeds were also higher with the x16 memory,
I’m not sure how much of a difference if any the 16 gig and 32 gig capacities would make here.
I was recently chatting to someone that works at one of the big laptop companies and asked if they
were also seeing basically no difference between x8 and x16 DDR5 memory, and they said that as
far as they were aware it just wasn’t going to be a concern with DDR5 memory this generation.
Which makes sense when you consider the technical aspects,
because DDR5 doubles the number of bank groups while leaving the number
of banks per bank group the same. Which increases efficiency compared to DDR4.
You won’t get memory sticks with only 2 bank groups with DDR5,
as per this Micron whitepaper. This enables controllers to avoid performance degradation
associated with sequential memory access within the same bank.
I might see if there are any differences with Ryzen 6000 in future once I get it
in for testing, but based on what I just said there’s probably no point.
DDR5 just seems better than DDR4 in this regard.
I’d rather not just blindly state that without testing it though and only rely on
the results from one laptop, so make sure you’re subscribed for future memory testing content.
Check out this video next to find the optimal memory configuration that you should be using
in your gaming laptop. We’ve tested a crazy amount of memory configurations to find out
which ones give you the best performance in games, so I’ll see you in that one next!