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BUYING GUIDE<br />
product is upping the amount of RAM. It’s not hard to<br />
find gaming laptops with ‘upgraded’ configurations<br />
that go from 16GB of DDR4 to 32GB.<br />
While having an adequate amount of RAM is<br />
important for gaming, today’s games typically top out<br />
at 16GB of RAM and sometimes can run fine with just<br />
8GB of RAM. Anything more than 16GB (our standard<br />
recommendation) is usually a waste of money.<br />
You might want to blame laptop and PC makers for<br />
cynically using an erroneous spec to manipulate the<br />
public, but the blame actually lies with the average<br />
buyer. PC makers have told us for years they only overspec<br />
RAM because the public thinks more is better.<br />
Besides the amount of memory, a couple other<br />
important, but not critical, questions to ask is what<br />
clock speed and what mode. Modern CPUs let you<br />
run RAM in sets to increase the memory bandwidth.<br />
If one shotgun barrel is good, two is better right?<br />
Not necessarily. If your laptop runs integrated<br />
graphics, then yes, having dual-channel memory<br />
helps a lot. But true gaming laptops today run<br />
beefy discrete graphics cards with their own pool<br />
of dedicated, and much faster, GDDR5 RAM.<br />
We’ve seen instances of gaming laptops using<br />
a single memory module, which hobbles system<br />
bandwidth but actually has very little impact on actual<br />
gaming performance. The same can be said of RAM<br />
clock speed. DDR4/2133, which runs at 2,133MHz,<br />
is the typical speed today, with PC vendors offering<br />
upgrades of DDR/2400. We recommend bypassing<br />
the upgrade and instead putting that money into<br />
more storage or a fatter GPU.<br />
84 TECH ADVISOR • MAY 2018<br />
Worldmags.net
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