A dual and single channel memory

Question

My question is in regards to potential laptop performance. Please forgive my ignorance in advance for most of this is quite new to me. I am wanting to upgrade the DDR3 ram in my laptop and also have an 850 Samsung SSD installed. My first question is this.

What is the difference between single channel memory and dual channel memory?

I ask because I was told my new laptop has single channel. 8 gigs of DDR3 to be exact. I have little doubt that I will see some performance increase with a ssd upgrade however due to my lack of understanding with certain aspects of computing I'm very unsure of the memory upgrade. My system specs are the following. AMD FX 8800p w/8 GB system memory. 1TB HD. R7 intergrated GPU and an R9 385 GPU 4GB DDR5 memory. Model is a Lenovo y700 available only at best buy. Also I was told it has an m.2 slot for a m.2 SSD but it will not be recognized by the system due to Lenovo not providing the traffic lanes for it to work which is what made me decide to go with the SATA type SSD. Last I was told to go with 1600 DDR3 stick and not the 2133 stick because again even though the computers CPU will work with it for reasons unknown to me it will also not recognize it pretty much being a waste of money.

Any insight would be extremely helpful, thanks!

Answer 1

The RAM sticks themselves doesn't really have anything to do with the channel configuration. It depends on your CPU/motherboard.

Instead of the channel configuration, available slot(s) should be more of your concern, especially considering this is a laptop. So you should instead check how many slots does it have and how many are already occupied.

If, for example, it has two slots in total and one of them is occupied by a single stick of 8GB RAM, and you would like to keep using it with an additional stick, instead of of replacing it with for example two sticks of 16GB RAM (because it's unnecessary or unsupported), then you probably want to get one with same frequency and timings, and maybe even from the same vendor.

However, if you somehow cannot get one of 1600 MHz but one of higher frequency, it might still work but it will be "underclocked".

FYR, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-channel_memory_architecture