Dual channel or higher capacity on budget laptop?

[Gershy13]

I've got a pretty cheap budget laptop (Lenovo Ideapad 3 14are05) and it has a relatively decent CPU (Ryzen 4300u) but only 4gb of 2666mhz ram soldered to the board. There is a sodimm slot for upgrade. I'm pretty sure I could use more ram for daily tasks and for my university work, but I'm not sure if I shud make it 8gb or 12gb.

If I upgrade it to 8gb (4+4) it'll be dual channel right, but in 12gb (4+8) it will only be single channel? 

 

Will there be a noticeable benefit for having dual channel on such a budget laptop? Or is more capacity better?

 

My main tasks are general everyday multitasking, chrome, and compiling c++ code for uni.

 

Thoughts?

 

Thanks

Gershy13

 

 

[FRD]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think either way it will be dual channel, because two sticks will be running and working together.

I'd say get another 4GB, so it will work good for sure, you only have to pick the right matching RAM stick. Adding 8GB is also good and pretty cheap actually, but you would have to check benchmarks to see if there's a performance difference. 12GB RAM can be very handy to have though, 8GB is full pretty fast in my experience.

[Gershy13]

5 minutes ago, FRD said:

I'm not 100% sure, but I think either way it will be dual channel, because two sticks will be running and working together.

I'd say get another 4GB, so it will work good for sure, you only have to pick the right matching RAM stick. Adding 8GB is also good and pretty cheap actually, but you would have to check benchmarks to see if there's a performance difference. 12GB RAM can be very handy to have though, 8GB is full pretty fast in my experience.

Yeah thats what i was thinking if there isnt a massive performance hit for more capacity with the 12gb, then id go with that as it gives me more capacity and its close enough in price. (4gb module is £17 and 8gb module is £29)

[Somerandomtechyboi]

8gb will run in dual channel and the rest of the 4gb on the other stick will run in single channel (if the 4gb stick is full) from my understanding

[FRD]

Just now, Gershy13 said:

Yeah thats what i was thinking if there isnt a massive performance hit for more capacity with the 12gb, then id go with that as it gives me more capacity and its close enough in price. (4gb module is £17 and 8gb module is £29)

It shouldn't be a big performance hit. I'd say get 8GB after all, because in reality we are talking about several FPS in games from the performance difference, usually it's just a few percent difference. For normal tasks you will rarely notice a difference, in your case I think more RAM is better than faster or matching dual channel RAM. More capacity has a bigger advantage in the long run.

[Parabellum117]

24 minutes ago, Gershy13 said:

If I upgrade it to 8gb (4+4) it'll be dual channel right, but in 12gb (4+8) it will only be single channel? 

Yes. Pretty sure dual channel works only if the RAM is identical in capacity. Personally, I would go with the dual channel (8GB total), since the other components would likely become the bottleneck even if the RAM was 12GB total if it isn't a higher-end laptop.

[Gershy13]

23 minutes ago, Parabellum117 said:

Yes. Pretty sure dual channel works only if the RAM is identical in capacity. Personally, I would go with the dual channel (8GB total), since the other components would likely become the bottleneck even if the RAM was 12GB total if it isn't a higher-end laptop.

thanks, ill probably get a 4gb stick to make it 8gb for now, and then if its still running into ram issues, return it and try the 12gb.