[SOLVED] AMD Ryzen 3500U ram upgrade

[tarmiricmi]

Hello,
I got as a present an HP Notebook - 15-db1041nm .

My typical use is office work and light development. I don't game (other than occasionally some 15+ years old ones).

When I use Visual Studio 2019 with some light projects, project build and run is slow.

Now this laptop's obvious limitation is only 8GB of RAM. It does have a fast NvME M.2 SSD and that Ryzen shouldn't be too bad as well.
However when I compare it's behavior in Visual Studio with my desktop rig (old I7 3770 with 5yrs old SSD but with 16 GB RAM), it crawls. My apps pretty much flie on that old I7 - at least for my needs - including coding. Specs-wise, that I7 is 26% faster than Ryzen 3500U which is probably not something substantiated.

So I am thinking about the RAM upgrade. The laptop supports up to 32 GB RAM. Should I go with 16 or 32 GB upgrade? Would be a 32 GB overkill on that CPU? Visual Studio is not the only thing which is significantly slower, for instance when I installed MS SQL it took nearly 2x longer then on my I7. Is it because of lacking RAM or because of slower CPU as well? SSD on that laptop is super fast so that is not the issue - Windows loads 2-3x times faster than on my desktop.

I would be dissapointed to invest in RAM upgrade and still to get crawling Visual Studio, so is it recommendable at all or should I get a better laptop (which would be the most expensive solution)?

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

Laptop CPUs often lack basic features important for apps like Visual Studio and SSMS which are present on desktop CPUs, even old ones like the 3770.

the biggest drawback on the 3500U is it’s low l1 and l2 cache at 384kb and 2mb respectively. The 3770 has 8Mb Intel “smart cache” so will run development apps such as visual studio much faster.

SSMS is just a reskin of visual studio at this point so the same applies to that.

you won’t be using all 8GB of ram when running VS 2019, although if you open up a lot of projects you probably will. So yeah upgrading the RAM to 16GB would help a little, but ultimately you are crippled by the mobile Ryzen.

 

[tarmiricmi]

Laptop CPUs often lack basic features important for apps like Visual Studio and SSMS which are present on desktop CPUs, even old ones like the 3770.

the biggest drawback on the 3500U is it’s low l1 and l2 cache at 384kb and 2mb respectively. The 3770 has 8Mb Intel “smart cache” so will run development apps such as visual studio much faster.

SSMS is just a reskin of visual studio at this point so the same applies to that.

you won’t be using all 8GB of ram when running VS 2019, although if you open up a lot of projects you probably will. So yeah upgrading the RAM to 16GB would help a little, but ultimately you are crippled by the mobile Ryzen.

Thanks. Yeah when i use VS2019 my RAM usage is ~75% but it is slow. So probably whatever RAM it has, it will still slow-compile programs, hence RAM upgrade = throwing money in water.

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

Personally I would sell the laptop and use the money to upgrade the desktop.

 

[Bob.B]

Hello,
I got as a present an HP Notebook - 15-db1041nm .

My typical use is office work and light development. I don't game (other than occasionally some 15+ years old ones).

When I use Visual Studio 2019 with some light projects, project build and run is slow.

Now this laptop's obvious limitation is only 8GB of RAM. It does have a fast NvME M.2 SSD and that Ryzen shouldn't be too bad as well.
However when I compare it's behavior in Visual Studio with my desktop rig (old I7 3770 with 5yrs old SSD but with 16 GB RAM), it crawls. My apps pretty much flie on that old I7 - at least for my needs - including coding. Specs-wise, that I7 is 26% faster than Ryzen 3500U which is probably not something substantiated.

So I am thinking about the RAM upgrade. The laptop supports up to 32 GB RAM. Should I go with 16 or 32 GB upgrade? Would be a 32 GB overkill on that CPU? Visual Studio is not the only thing which is significantly slower, for instance when I installed MS SQL it took nearly 2x longer then on my I7. Is it because of lacking RAM or because of slower CPU as well? SSD on that laptop is super fast so that is not the issue - Windows loads 2-3x times faster than on my desktop.

I would be dissapointed to invest in RAM upgrade and still to get crawling Visual Studio, so is it recommendable at all or should I get a better laptop (which would be the most expensive solution)?

You might find that adding another matching stick of ram would enable the dual channel feature.

Nice bump in perf.