A few months ago, I ordered a Minisforum UM690 for work.<p>For less than 500 bucks, this little beast is equipped with the incredibly powerful 8 cores / 16 threads Ryzen 9 6900HX (4.9GHz) and an integrated RDN2 680M graphics card (the single thread performance of this mobile CPU is just 10% lower than my home 5800X desktop PC).<p>I do some light gaming on my lunch break, and I was pretty impressed by the gaming performance of the 680M.<p>Because of budget constraints at the time of ordering, I could only afford a single stick of Gskill - RipJaws 16 Go DDR5 4800 MHz CL34.<p>I made a few benchmarks on multiple games, but most games I play do not come with a proper benchmark loop, so I used Unigine Superposition Benchmark to make a proper benchmark.<p>Single 16 GB stick, 1080p, medium settings: 3022 (18.85 min fps, 22.61 avg fps, 31.85 max fps)<p>Those results were good for an IGPU, but I saw a few articles saying that having two sticks instead of one could improve performance (never backed up with benchmarks or hard numbers).<p>So I bought another stick. Here are the results with two sticks:<p>Dual 16 GB sticks, 1080p, medium settings: 4969 (31.66 min fps, 37.17 avg fps, 48.96 max fps)<p>Yep, this is a whopping +65% with two sticks!<p>So, if you use a CPU with an integrated graphics card, you should use 2 sticks!
I've noticed the same with my Asus TUF laptops. I've had 2 generations of the 15" models with Ryzen processors and adding a second stick seemed to "wake" them up in a noticeable way. They Ryzen memory controller really seems to benefit from memory running in DDR mode (2 sticks).
This is fine to post, but not as a Show HN - see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html</a>.<p>I've done a s/Show/Tell/ on the title so it's fine now.
Going from 2 sticks to 4 sticks on my threadripper drastically improved thoughput so yes, always a good idea to max out the channels. I'm just happy I still have 4 more to fill but I probably won't need that much extra memory for years to come.
Same thing with intel. 11th gen (and 12th gen) laptops with integrated graphics come with this disclaimer [1]<p>> Intel Iris Xe Graphics capability requires system to be configured with dual-channel memory. On the system with single-channel memory, Intel Iris Xe Graphics will function as Intel UHD Graphics.<p>[1] <a href="https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_E14_Gen_2_Intel/ThinkPad_E14_Gen_2_Intel_Spec.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_E...</a>
I considered buying one because of this post, but <a href="https://store.minisforum.com/" rel="nofollow">https://store.minisforum.com/</a> unfortunately seems to be down right now.
Has little to do with the ram and much more to do with your processor and how it handles caching and memory channels, especially considering you were using integrated graphics. (Which would be cached where?)