DDR3 vs DDR4 laptop ram comparison

[Mike2121]

To begin with I am buying a laptop and some people tell me it does not matter whether it has ddr3 or ddr4 ram. Other people tell me it makes a huge difference as ddr4 is blazing fast while ddr3 is super slow. Can someone explain this to me. Also on a side note does it really matter what ssd you have as long as you have one in your laptop?

[TheGlenlivet]

4 minutes ago, Mike2121 said:

To begin with I am buying a laptop and some people tell me it does not matter whether it has ddr3 or ddr4 ram. Other people tell me it makes a huge difference as ddr4 is blazing fast while ddr3 is super slow. Can someone explain this to me. Also on a side note does it really matter what ssd you have as long as you have one in your laptop?

It's true that the difference in speed between DDR3 and 4 might not be noticeable, but you can only use one or the other.  If your laptop uses DDR4, then it does so exclusively.

Yes, get an SSD.  the speed difference between sata and m.2 won't be noticeable for normal tasks.

[DocSwag]

The more significant improvement is on the power consumption side of things. This matters more for laptops. DDR4 has a lower operating voltage than DDR3.

 

That being said, I don't believe any CPUs currently support LPDDR4, whereas all the modern Intel mobile CPUs support LPDDR3 which is better from a power consumption perspective than normal DDR4. 

 

From the bandwidth side, I don't think it's enough of an improvement for DDR4 to matter over LPDDR3 unless you're looking at a laptop with a strong iGPU that needs the memory bandwidth.

 

EDIT: About the SSD, most modern SSDs won't be distinguishable from each other in day to day tasks. Older SSDs or workloads that are more demanding such as large file transfers may see differences, though.