The Dirty Way Manufacturers are Downgrading Your PC

If it weren’t for Tech Channels , manufacturers would be getting away with A LOT of stuff.

They sneak into your house and replace your parts with worse ones

$1650 might be a “cheaper gaming laptop” - but that’s still a lot of money. Enough for them to spend the extra $3 on proper RAM. Getting fed up with the computer market these days.

I worked for a modem chip manufacturer back in the late 90s. The end modem manufacturers would sell awesome perfect modems for 90 days, until all the reviews were in, then start shipping cost reduced versions afterward. It drove us crazy. Some of them did good quality cost reduction and they still worked well, but others did crap work on the redesign, and the performance took a huge hit.

It's great to see this topic covered! It seems like there are so many ways performance can differ with laptops based on specs that aren't even listed anywhere. We finally started to get GPU power limits listed for products, so hopefully RAM details are next. Often it's also not clear whether or not a laptop has a MUX switch either, depends on the brand though.

Jarrod's tech finally getting recognition he deserves

In the server world we've known about the difference in ram density for a long time. There's a cost difference, not a conspiracy. The amd laptop you're testing is the result of cost cutting and keeping the margin to boost profits. It's crappy that any manufacturer would hide the density.

This also happens with SSDs as well. The first batches of drives that go out to reviewers will be fine but later batches may have different/worse/cheaper chips inside. Capacity still the same but read/write times aren't going to be as good as those initial reviews say they should be and mfgrs get better profit margins...

The scary thing is that some laptops and AIO's have soldered RAM...

I'm seeing a lot of confusion here about 1x8 and 1x16 and people thinking it has to do with single and dual rank. This specifically has nothing to do with ranks but everything to do with how a x8 device is configured and how a x16 device is configured within a DIMM. In the video, Linus touched upon it but I think didn't explicitly state the technical exact reason for the difference in performance. He was very close to it, and I think gave a sufficient explanation for it but here I'll try to elaborate if it interests you. You can lay out the total capacity for a DIMM in various ways really, in this case you have two ways to achieve 8GB of total capacity (note the bit to byte conversion): 1. 1 rank of 8 chips x 8Gb in density = 64Gb total density = 8GB total density 2. 1 rank of 4 chips x 16Gb in density = 64 Gb total density = 8GB total density The nomenclature for the device width is related to the total amount of data pins on a channel. DDR4 channels are typically 64-bits wide, so if you have a: 1. x8 device- it means a single rank within the channel has exactly 8 chips to make-up 64 data pins 2. x16 device- it means a single rank within the channel has exactly 4 chips to make-up 64 data pins Now with the explanation out of the way, you can go deeper into the architectural layout typically found in devices in DDR4: 1. a x8 device has a total of 16 addressable banks (it has 4 Bank Groups and 4 Banks per Bank Group) with a 1KB page size [each page a bank is allowed to open at any given time] 2. a x16 device has a total of 8 addressable banks (it has 2 Bank Groups and 4 Banks per Bank Group) with a 2KB page size Having less banks available to the MC means you have less resources to interleave and lower chances of extracting the full BW available according to the rated maximum bus speed. The analogy Linus gave about the librarian searching for a book makes total sense with this in mind. Now the next thing to affect performance is the page size: Typically the page size usually dictates tFAW (Four Activate Window Time), so it's usually worse for 2KB than it is for 1KB by several nano-seconds which can affect performance [need to look up data sheets for a given device by the given manufacturer to look up exactly what they are]. You can look up the datasheets via google, I quickly found ones by micron for example. Anyway as for why this happens, this is directly tied to memory advancements really, over time memory chip suppliers make denser chips on smaller nodes. As time goes on they will have more of one kind than the other. Given the density of the DIMM here is 8GB, that means as memory gets more advanced, they can make more wafers to supply everyone in the world (and a bonus is that its cheaper to include less chips on a module to sell for the same 8GB capacity OR to now make denser DIMMs aka 16GB x8 modules). Hope this long explanation is enlightening to some people here!

You're talking about "smart marketing" while manufacturers' websites are still unusable messes of redundant information. I'm looking at you, Dell!

It's like the good old days back in the 90's, you combo the right components you get a awesome performance PC, you got to mix & match to find the bottle neck. I remember when my PC was 3 years older than everyone ells at the lan party but I end up running CS or Quake server from my rig as it outperformed everyone's newer PC. lol

LTT and other tech channels are an absolute necessity in this space and make themselves invaluable to consumers.

First SSD speeds and now RAM. We need a new series that covers bad practices by manufacturers.

As a computer technician I'm seeing "no" durability or longevity built into new products. It's all throwaway, it's so much worse than just three years ago. I work in healthcare and a CT, MRI, standard X-Ray, and fluroscope were built to last 20 years or more. No longer. Multi-million dollar machines are often delivered broken. The useful life is just 3 years. It's insanity!

Just a note: This issue may have affected every comparison review that you have done. XD

“Gullible humans, fighting between Intel and AMD, T’WAS I WHO PLAYED THOUSE!!!” ~ DDR4 module

I like how Anthony is known as the 'Big A" now

Don't forget about the CAS latency too! It's never listed either (even when buying ram sticks individually sometimes) and does affect performance too

I just wanna say, I bought an 8$ thermal paste (i still have more than half) that decreased my medium temp under load by 30 degrees C, literally.... I always has it 97/99 thermal throttling like crazy, now it rarely passes 71/72. I just want to know why they dont invest 2 or 3$ more in a 1000$+ laptop for an amazing performance and life expectancy boost in their machines. Can someone tell me how this greedy "if it isn't written in the specs we get the cheapest possible" mentality is even legal and accepted in the community?