Thanks for posting these. I am just about to order a Librem 14 and was going to ask about RAM for it. In particular I am interested in SK Hynix sticks but there is such a variation in prices no doubt related to specs. I am hopeless with this stuff but saw some individual 32gb sticks on Amazon for about $300.
If anyone has any recommendations about the higher end SK Hynix I’d be interested in your experiences thoughts etc.
Your starting point should be - What CPU is it? What does the Intel web site show for supported memory frequencies? There isn’t generally much point getting memory that is higher frequency than the CPU supports but, apart from that, higher frequency is better.
Do I want two sticks or one? Two sticks is better in order to take advantage of CPUs with dual channels (which these days would be all Intel laptop and desktop CPUs?) but two sticks will cost you more if you want to put in more memory in the future (which is not a problem of course if you are already maxing out the particular CPU - and this is most definitely assuming that there are only two memory slots, which would usually be true for laptops but might not be true for desktops) and one stick can cost you more now if it is beyond the sweet spot in capacity for current manufacturing capability.
You must always select the correct choice out of DIMM v. SODIMM but laptops are “always”(?) SODIMM.
You must always select the correct voltage.
You should pay attention to the RAM data rate e.g. DDR4, but DDR5 is a bit bleeding edge at the moment so your CPU is unlikely to support it and pretty much everything will be DDR4.
With all that locked in, the only (?) remaining variable for the RAM itself is latency, lower is better, details discussed e.g. here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_timings
I would stick with a reputable brand, and a reputable supplier (since you don’t want counterfeit that is probably completely mislabeled but might well still work). In my opinion all the brands mentioned so far in this topic are reputable.