Memory Timings on Laptop v. Desktop Memory

[leo1798]

Exposition:

Spoiler

My younger brother is starting university this fall and I made a laptop suggestion in the form of the ASUS Scar II with an 8750H and a GTX 1070 which was on sale for $1400. The only problem appeared to be that the 16gb of Memory that it came loaded with from Newegg was in single channel which, to my understanding from watching too many Hardware Unboxed Laptop Reviews, can tank performance by up to 20% in some games. This prompted me to get him a second 16gb stick since it was my suggestion in the first place, and when I went to order such I noticed that the timings for most sticks were terrible. I wound up going with a 16gb G-Skill Ripjaws dimm which was surprisingly cheap at only $60, but at 2666 MHz the timings were an abysmal CL 19 @ 1.2v. My desktop kit of also-cheap G-Skill Aegis RAM easily overclocked to 3200 MHz with CL 16 @ 1.35v, but came with the same timings at 3000MHz out of the box.

 

This lead me to question - do 260-pin laptop dimms typically suffer from worse timings than their 288-pin desktop counterparts, or is this just because I went with a cheaper kit? If so, why?

 

Also, on an unrelated note, does anyone know if you can adjust memory timings on a laptop? I've never bothered with my own laptop as it's bottlenecked in many other ways, but I'm still curious to find out.

[Crunchy Dragon]

If there's a UEFI BIOS in the laptop, you can probably mess with the timings and clock speed of your memory.

 

My guess would be laptop RAM tends to be slower because it's cheaper for laptop manufacturers and it's going in a laptop anyway; most people who buy a laptop aren't looking to squeeze every ounce of performance they can out of it.

 

I would also say that the RAM you bought had worse timings because it was cheaper; cheaper RAM tends to be slower with worse timings. I paid $50 for the 8GB stick of DDR4-2133 that went into my Ryzen PC, I don't believe the timings are very good on it, but it's also kind of the slowest DDR4 gets.

[leo1798]

40 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

If there's a UEFI BIOS in the laptop, you can probably mess with the timings and clock speed of your memory.

 

My guess would be laptop RAM tends to be slower because it's cheaper for laptop manufacturers and it's going in a laptop anyway; most people who buy a laptop aren't looking to squeeze every ounce of performance they can out of it.

 

I would also say that the RAM you bought had worse timings because it was cheaper; cheaper RAM tends to be slower with worse timings. I paid $50 for the 8GB stick of DDR4-2133 that went into my Ryzen PC, I don't believe the timings are very good on it, but it's also kind of the slowest DDR4 gets.

Yeah, memory speeds aren't something that most people care about with laptops, myself included, especially for intel. 2666MHz is plenty and I can probably get the timings cut down to something like CAS 14 or 16 on both sticks. Sadly though, I probably won't have "Memory Try It" like I do with my desktop MSI board.

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 minute ago, leo1798 said:

Yeah, memory speeds aren't something that most people care about with laptops, myself included, especially for intel. 2666MHz is plenty and I can probably get the timings cut down to something like CAS 14 or 16 on both sticks. Sadly though, I probably won't have "Memory Try It" like I do with my desktop MSI board.

Intel is a lot less picky about memory speed than Ryzen is, from what I've read.

 

Most people who buy laptops probably don't really care that the memory isn't as fast as it could be, since like I said, they're usually not looking to squeeze everything they can out of it.