32GB RAM single slot compatibility with 13'

I see 32GB single slot is in the market two of them are just sample in amazon

Samsung

Sushkin

Questions

  1. Are they fit to the mainboard of librem13/15
  2. Is it possible to buy RAM on my own. I see no None value in the box or how to return RAM at first purchase order
  3. Why don’t purism put 32GB in the choice. I guess mainboard frequency is not match to RAM frequency

Thank you for the answer.

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  1. physically yes, unknown if they will actually work. Intel’s spec for KBL-U is 16GBx2 max.
  2. you can’t buy a “bare” device without SSD or RAM, no
  3. because 32GB sodimms are not officially supported by the SoC, and we haven’t tested to determine otherwise
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Thank you very much for technical details.

If you could test them, that would be very helpful to the community as well as potentially increase adoption of the laptops.

a bit of googling shows that 32MB modules have been tested as working on a Lenovo T480 (Kabylake-R), so quite possible that they will work with KBL-U as well. I’ll talk to the support folks about testing

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I think this is one better suited for the community to test as even if it works for a given user with a given config it’s not officially supported by the SOC and in turn would be impractical from a business standpoint for purism to support. I think most of us would rather purism spent that time on further development than testing something saying “the non-supported configuration didn’t work” then all it takes is one person to say “it’s working for me” and they have to waste time with people going “why won’t you sell it this way, you must have tested it wrong, it works for that person”; or worse, they test it, it works, they say it works, then a security fix breaks whatever allowed it to work at the time of testing/it works on their test systems but not all systems and they are now dealing with support requests of "you said it works but my computer won’t boot in this config that isn’t technically supported.

Purism’s best option, in my opinion, is to do like they’ve done; share that it’s not supported and do nothing else. If the community finds a way that works for some but not others purism can simply point to the “we passed along that this isn’t officially supported, our advise is to go back to a supported configuration”.

This is something every hardware vendor I’ve dealt with does and I find it to be a reasonable approach. Support what is supported and let others experiment with what “might” work. I personally had an Intel motherboard working in a non-standard configuration for years before a bios update broke that but fixed a different issue I had, which is why I mention a security fix breaking the non-supported configuration.

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OK, I’m going to go ahead and order the Samsung 32GB module, since I’m using a Samsung 16GB module currently (long story).

I’ll let Purism decide whether or not they want to officially support it, it’s more of a business decision.

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I can confirm that the Samsung module is working for me after a bit of initial use. I’m on a 13" v3 i7-6500U (skylake).

I’ll post another update in a few days.

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Everything is still good with the Samsung 32GB module. Power consumption during sleep is also nominal.

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Which version of the librem 13 do you have? So which cpu is it which supports the 32gb modules? Just asking because i still have a thinkpad with only one slot with a skylake cpu and this would be a nice indicator if it might works on it too if yours is a skykake model (librem 13 v1-v3)

Good question. I have a 13" v3 with a i7-6500U (skylake). Updated info above.

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Librem 13v1 is Broadwell, not Skylake :slight_smile:

Ohh. Thanks for correcting me.

A friend just tested the Samsung with a Librem 15v3, and it also works. The CPU is i7-7500U (kabylake).

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I just bought the Mushkin for my Librem13v2. I’ll report back when I receive it.

we’ve been testing 32GB modules on both the 13v4/15v4 and will be announcing it as an upgrade option shortly

edit: looks like we already have :slight_smile:

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The Samsung 32GB RAM is working well with my Librem 15v3.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N124XDS/

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I just put one of these in my v4 and it works great.

Unwisely, I had ordered the bare-bones memory configuration, which was 8GB of 2100 MHz Kingston RAM. Often on boot, there would be some sort of timing glitch and the hard drive wouldn’t always get decrypted. That seems to have gone away with the 2666MHz RAM.

Reviving this thread.

I just bought the same Samsung module (32gb, 2666MHz, M471A4G43MB1) for my Librem 13v2 and it won’t boot with the dimm installed.

Now before I’ll try and return it I’d be interested if anyone has an idea why that would be. Librem is updated to the latest coreboot image. I didn’t test the memory itself for lack of a second DDR4 laptop, but I’ll try to get my hands on one.

Not seated correctly?

Otherwise, I don’t know whether anyone above reported that 32GB module works with a v2 so maybe report the exact CPU model number here. There are reports above that the v3 and v4 work with 32GB RAM.