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).
I do some light gaming on my lunch break, and I was pretty impressed by the gaming performance of the 680M.
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.
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.
Single 16 GB stick, 1080p, medium settings: 3022 (18.85 min fps, 22.61 avg fps, 31.85 max fps)
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).
So I bought another stick. Here are the results with two sticks:
Dual 16 GB sticks, 1080p, medium settings: 4969 (31.66 min fps, 37.17 avg fps, 48.96 max fps)
Yep, this is a whopping +65% with two sticks!
So, if you use a CPU with an integrated graphics card, you should use 2 sticks!
The diffrence is surely not 65% and in fact barely visible: https://techguided.com/single-channel-vs-dual-channel-vs-qua...
What's interesting here imho, is the staggering difference it makes on an CPU integrated GPU (which makes sense since the GPU is using the comptuer RAM instead of its own RAM).
Also, we've been told DDR5 had built-in dual channel on a single stick so I was not sure this would make any difference at all.
It's really necessary to start thinking in terms of the total width of the memory bus. DIMMs have a 64-bit wide connection. Dual-channel used to only mean half of your DIMM slots were on channel A and half of them were on channel B, for a total of a 128-bit wide memory bus if you populated both channels.
DDR5 splits the DIMM's 64-bit connection into two sub-channels of 32 bits each. But mainstream CPUs still have the same 128-bit total width for their DRAM controllers, so you still need more than one DIMM installed to use all the (sub)channels provided by the CPU's memory controller.
Comparing the 128-bit wide memory bus against the bus widths used by discrete GPUs (and comparing the memory clock speeds) makes it much less surprising that running integrated graphics in a crippled 64-bit wide memory configuration would be problematic. Graphics is a very bandwidth-hungry task.
Gamers Nexus backed it up with a 27 minute video in late 2020, with plenty of benchmarks to demonstrate that there can be measurable improvement from bank interleaving. https://youtu.be/-UkGu6A-6sQ
Computer literacy is on its way down, not that it was particularly high in the first place, so it's foolhardy to just assume some random Joe would know what a computer is, let alone RAM, let alone channels.
Perhaps it depends on your definition of "Copmuter literacy", but do you have any evidence to back up that claim? I find it surprising.
In fact this question is wrong, or at least misleading. The OP went from one DDR5 dimm (with two 32 bit channels) to 2 DDR5 dimms with a total of 4 32 bit channels. Thus doubled the bandwidth, but also doubled the number of memory quests you can have in flight.
Given that GPUs in general are quite bandwidth intensive, not surprising that graphics performance significant increased. This is the main reason why the M1 pro -> M1 max doubles the memory bandwidth, it doubles the iGPU performance in many cases.
That's not what DDR means. DDR means transferring data on both the rising edge and falling edge of the clock signal. That's true no matter how many chips or modules are involved.
You're thinking of running memory in a dual-channel configuration, which requires two modules but is not synonymous with using two memory sticks, because using both channels also requires putting your two memory modules in the correct slots so that you don't have two modules sharing one channel.
I've done a s/Show/Tell/ on the title so it's fine now.
> 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.
[1] https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_E...
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