There's a lot of conflicting information on the internet about this

If we have 16 GB (2x8) of RAM in our laptop and want to upgrade, *and* if we would be fine with 24 GB, would it be fine to replace one of the 8 GB SODIMMs with a 16 GB one? What do I need to watch out for? I'd try to find ones with the same timings and speed rating of course (though i'm not sure what the difference is between the various timings that cpu-z lists...)

I'm considering this because it's much easier to afford than upgrading all the way to 32 GB, replacing all the RAM the laptop came with. It only has two slots on the motherboard, as most laptops do, so unfortunately we can't just add a third 8 GB sodimm

...even if we can it's probably too expensive to do right now anyway

@Felthry you usually really want matching RAM because otherwise you won't get dual-channel (which effectively doubles your RAM speed). It's also generally discouraged to use different RAM in both slots because that combo might not work at all.

16GB is quite a lot of RAM, what are you doing that needs more than that?

@noiob Nothing has broken so far but minecraft really eats up RAM like a.... very ram-hungry thing when it's heavily modded. our computer normally idles at around 40-50% RAM usage and this modpack uses at least 9 GB even when I tell it not to use more than 8 GB in the jvm launch flags

@Felthry how can it use 9GB on a 8GB machine? you really want fast RAM for gaming. Is this on Windows?

@noiob it's a 16 GB machine
yes it's on windows
I thought ram speed didn't really matter much?? saw a thing about the difference being single-digit percents

@Felthry Discord runs an entire HTML rendering stack, idk what's wrong with your browser but mine only uses 800MB right now

RAM speed used to make less of a difference, but nowadays you kinda want stuff that can be run at a decent speed. You probably can't do any RAM overclocking on a laptop (it's called that but they rate the DIMMs at a certain speed, you're supposed to run them at that), so getting the fastest stuff won't do you any good, but running what you have at half speed will probably be noticeable

some RAM controllers can apparently adapt and e.g. run half the RAM as dual channel, half as single channel but that sounds like a deep rabbit hole to dive into https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_Channel#Dual_Channel_Asymmetric_2

@Felthry in general browsers and stuff will use more RAM on a machine that has more RAM available, why waste all that memory

@noiob is there any way to tell them to stop doing that and that i do not need waterfox using four gigabytes of RAM just because it's been open for a couple days

@Felthry you can run Discord in a browser so it doesn't have to add its own
can't you just restart your browser? idk that looks like it's leaking memory, try disabling some extensions
idk if Waterfox has about:performance but that might give you some insight into what is using how much RAM

@noiob it's only using about 800 mb right now since i just restarted it but over time it ends up using way more and it really shouldn't