There’s one spec that unifies most laptop users: soldered RAM. Hate it or love it, it’s present in many laptops, sometimes making them impossible to upgrade in any meaningful way.
Although soldered RAM has its downsides, I’m here to tell you why I couldn’t care less about that particular spec, and why you shouldn’t either.
What is soldered RAM, and why do laptops use it?
A quick explainer before we dive in.
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
When a laptop uses soldered RAM, it means the memory isn’t sitting in removable SO-DIMM slots—it’s permanently soldered to the motherboard. Another variant of this (although far from the exact same thing) is when the memory is integrated on-package near the CPU.
The goal with these laptops is to achieve thinner designs, better battery efficiency, and tighter signal integrity.
Soldered RAM is increasingly popular in thin-and-light laptops, mostly because many of them use LPDDR, which is a low-power version of RAM that’s typically soldered close to the processor.
Although it gets a lot of bad rap, soldered RAM is far from all bad. The key thing to consider here is that LPDDR runs at lower voltages, so it needs to sit very close to the processor to maintain solid signal integrity, and soldering it down makes that easier to achieve.
It won’t make a world of difference in terms of performance, but it does allow manufacturers to go more low-profile while still offering a great experience. It also takes significantly less space, which makes it a good trade-off in 13- and 14-inch laptops, freeing up some precious internal space for a bigger battery or a better cooling solution.
Soldered RAM used to be a hot topic in laptops, with many people bashing it for various reasons, but is it really still something to worry about during the ongoing RAM-pocalypse?
The consequences of using soldered RAM
Do they outweigh the benefits?
Credit: Jordan Gloor / How-To Geek
The main gripe with soldered RAM for most people is its lack of repairability and the fact that it can’t be upgraded.
It’s true that once you commit to a laptop RAM spec, that’s it, and you won’t be able to swap it all out to upgrade with faster memory. However, many laptops still allow you to add some extra RAM by combining soldered memory with one extra slot that you can use. But if you don’t want to do that and you want to keep your RAM exactly the same, it does make the initial purchase a little more consequential. Whatever RAM config you commit to when shopping is the one that’ll stay with you until you replace your laptop one day.
As mentioned, repairability gets problematic when RAM is soldered. Instead of a simple RAM replacement, you’d be looking at a whole motherboard swap. Fortunately, RAM failures are rare, but of course, not impossible.
Another downside of soldered RAM is that you’re often paying quite a premium when choosing a memory upgrade for your laptop. It used to be cheaper to just add a couple of RAM sticks than to buy a laptop with a pre-configured RAM upgrade. These days, RAM prices are sky-high, so it makes no difference.
It’s time to make peace with soldered RAM
It’s not as big a problem as some make it out to be.
Credit: Amazon
Soldered RAM is annoying in principle, and I totally get viewing it as a downside for some laptops. But I always view it as more of a trade-off: You get a thin, fast laptop, and sacrifice some future-proofing and repairability to achieve that result.
The truth is, laptops aren’t made to be ultra-upgradable. You can get a new SSD (hopefully not a QLC drive) for some of them, but most don’t go far beyond that after the point of purchase. It’s not like a desktop where you can swap anything you want at any given time, and as a PC building enthusiast, I’m okay with that.
I own two laptops, and both of them have soldered memory. The mainstream market is slowly moving away from the idea of customizing a laptop you already own. You can make some decisions pre-purchase, including storage, RAM, and even display, but once you own it, that’s it.
That doesn’t have to be a problem.
The reality often is that before your laptop ever runs out of RAM, it may start showing signs of aging in other ways, too, eventually leading to it being replaced. Beyond that, laptops now come in so many shapes and sizes that it’s easy to pick one that works for your particular use case.
However, I do agree that it’s wasteful to replace a laptop simply because you’re running out of RAM. It’s best to check the Task Manager and figure out your actual memory usage before panicking about that, though. Thin-and-light laptops weren’t meant to run boatloads of resource-heavy tasks, so if you use your laptop the way it was meant to be used, you likely won’t run into any problems.
Do you need to worry about soldered RAM?
It’s better to think ahead.
Credit: Tim Brookes / How-To Geek
If your choice is between a laptop with or without soldered RAM, chances are that this won’t be the only decision you’re faced with. Soldered RAM is a common thing in productivity-oriented laptops, and while it’s possible to find notebooks that don’t have soldered/on-package memory, it can mean sacrificing something else instead. Non-soldered RAM is much more common in high-end productivity laptops or gaming machines, where performance is more important than the slim form factor many people like for working on the go. (With that said, productivity laptops of all sizes and price ranges feature that type of RAM.)
The main problem is often figuring out whether a laptop even has soldered RAM or not. This isn’t often clearly stated in retail listings, so digging through spec sheets might be your best bet.
Let’s imagine you’re faced with the scenario of dealing with two laptops that suit your needs, but one has soldered memory, and the other one doesn’t.
This only needs to be a problem if you deal with any of the following:
- Lots of apps and browser tabs open at a time
- Creative work
- Gaming
- Video editing or rendering.
- Heavy Adobe workflows
- RAW libraries
- Docker
- VMs
- Local AI tools
In those cases, soldered RAM will often be a downside. Either buy a model with heaps of RAM (32GB is a good choice for most power users) or pick one that has standalone memory, or at least soldered RAM with an empty SO-DIMM slot for future upgrades.
If you just want a laptop for day-to-day productivity or entertainment, you hardly ever need to worry about soldered RAM. This is now more true than ever, with RAM prices rising almost weekly due to the ongoing shortage. It’ll be easier and cheaper to buy a laptop with enough RAM from the get-go than to upgrade it yourself for (most likely) the next couple of years, so you might be better off.
