I am contemplating the choice of RAM for my future Lenovo laptop and decided to share my thoughts and seek advice from experienced users. I have several options, each with its own pros and cons.
Pros: High clock speed, positively affecting overall system speed.
Cons: Limited memory capacity, which may pose challenges when handling resource-intensive tasks.
My tasks mainly involve everyday operations - internet surfing, working with office applications, and multimedia content consumption. However, in my free time, I enjoy photo and video editing, so I want my laptop to excel in handling these tasks.
What RAM configuration would you recommend in this situation? Perhaps someone has experience with similar setups on Lenovo laptops? I appreciate any advice and personal experiences in advance!
Both these options aren’t really good for a new build. If a new laptop maxes out at 16GB it’s likely already obsolete. Plus, with RAM being so cheap these days, just get good RAM and (relatively) lots of it. Aim for a laptop that at minimum, allows 32 GB Max RAM. But 64 GB might be worth the extra cost depending on what you’re doing. RAM is not very expensive at the moment. I don’t know why so many manufactures are releasing builds with so little RAM.
If someone disagrees please share → but from what I’ve read the overall speed of RAM isn’t usually a bottleneck. The exception being if you’re using RAM that is outdated and way behind the rest of the components. Most of the modern RAM you can buy is pretty fast. Usually, systems have ‘preferred’ RAM specs which are best to stick to. That might make it easier when narrowing down the available options.
Spend the money on the RAM and save money elsewhere. Go out less. Change your own oil… It’s not worth trying to save a few bucks on RAM
I’ve had occasion to check out Rhino’s performance on very low spec laptops recently (new but 11th gen I3, 8GB) looking at models from an engineering and plugin author perspective. From what I can see, Rhino does a lot better than some of the active power users give it credit for except for three use cases:
raytracing - obvious. If you need to do a lot of this, figure out what your time is worth and invest in hardware accordingly. This isn’t a criticism of Rhino, just an acknowledgment that raytracing is hard and will be a bottleneck if you do a lot of it.
very complicated models - I’ve been loading anything you see in the support forums just fine up to a model which resembled a hundreds of meg housing development. Complicated architecture projects may be too much but it seems like reasonably complex mechanisms and parts are fine. The biggest slowdown in my own workflow that I’ve seen was area+volume+center calcs for a small section of a battleship hull model: it took a few seconds and I assume it’s CPU bound.
you like really smooth UI response- a high frame rate with no stutters, skips, etc. when panning or rotating.
Since you’re looking at Lenovos and you want to do photo and video editing, I’ll mention one other thing: the color on mine (IdeaPad 3, new in August) is really poor. I was getting some help with a logo design and having to ask the graphic designer what color certain things actually were. The problem was the laptop; comparing side by side with my cell phone screen was enlightening. If you get a chance, check out the screen you’ll be getting in person.
