Upgrading ram with 1 of 2 sticks soldered

[atavax]

Right now my laptop has 2 sticks of 8gb ram 8x8 for 16gb total. 1 of them is soldered. The laptop supports up to 32gb of ram. Can I stick a 32gb stick into the unsoldered slot and have 32gb of ram or can I only get 16gb from a single slot? Edit for clarity

[Pixel5]

so just to be clear you got 2x4GB one is soldered and one is not or is it 2x8GB?

 

theoretically you can just add a 16GB stick and you will end up with either 20GB or 24GB total ram depending on if the soldered part is 4 or 8GB.

 

this will also automatically disable dual channel so while you gain more memory you lose a ton of bandwidth so depending on your CPU you may even lose performance there as some CPUs depend on fast RAM.

[Chris Pratt]

I think you'd need to stick with 16GB, max, as 32GB+8GB would exceed the specs of the rig. However, then, what @Pixel5 said applies. You might be better off just treating it like it's not upgradeable at all, since they kind of made that decision for you by soldering the DIMM. This may actually be a way of forcing you to get upgrades from them directly, which sadly isn't all that uncommon.

[Roswell]

You can put a 16GB stick in so you stay under 32. You’ll get dual channel up to 16GB of usage and then it will switch to single channel once that’s exceeded.