Figure Out Whether Monolithic 16GB DDR3 SO-DIMM Compatible With Laptop Manufactured Before They Existed

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imallett

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Jul 13, 2017
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I have a Clevo x7200 (Sager NP 7282) laptop. It has three slots for three SO-DIMMs, each currently filled with a 4 GB SO-DIMM, for a total of 12 GB. It works great, except that programmers don't seem to care about memory anymore, and so 12 GB is feeling a bit small these days.

I would like to upgrade it to at least 32 GB, and possibly 48 GB, which should be possible with two or three 16 GB SO-DIMMs. However, I would like to make sure this is compatible.

The manual says that it has:
Memory Expandable up to 12GB
Compatible with 1GB, 2GB or 4GB Modules
Click to expand...
However, considering that I (think) 8 GB and 16 GB SO-DIMMs didn't exist when the manual was made, this isn't surprising. Is there a more current way to find out the max capacity? For what reasons might it not accept a higher capacity SO-DIMM?
 
Solution
BFG-9000
No. Intel chipsets through Ivy Bridge could only support up to 4Gbit RAM chips, for up to 4GB sticks with 8 devices on them (a desktop can fit 16 devices on a stick for 8GB). AMD and Haswell chips work fine with monolithic so it likely defaults to an 8Gbit arrangement.

The monolithic chips have a sort of intelligent buffer chip (like registered memory) that can simulate lower density dies on Sandy-E and Ivy-E chips on X79, but only with BIOS support telling the monolithic chip to configure things this way via the MRC. The chances of Clevo/Sager upgrading the BIOS of your old Nehalem laptop to do this are about zero. The big announcement of 8G monolithic dies 3 years ago said:
practically any processor of any...
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

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Sep 17, 2016
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No. Intel chipsets through Ivy Bridge could only support up to 4Gbit RAM chips, for up to 4GB sticks with 8 devices on them (a desktop can fit 16 devices on a stick for 8GB). AMD and Haswell chips work fine with monolithic so it likely defaults to an 8Gbit arrangement.

The monolithic chips have a sort of intelligent buffer chip (like registered memory) that can simulate lower density dies on Sandy-E and Ivy-E chips on X79, but only with BIOS support telling the monolithic chip to configure things this way via the MRC. The chances of Clevo/Sager upgrading the BIOS of your old Nehalem laptop to do this are about zero. The big announcement of 8G monolithic dies 3 years ago said:
practically any processor of any manufacturer on the market works with the new memory, except for most Intel processors as its memory reference code (MRC), a piece of software code in the BIOS, can only understand DDR3 chip-sizes of 4Gb maximum.
Click to expand...
 
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