While looking for a new laptop a while back I noticed that a huge number of laptops have what I’m going to call “partially soldered” RAM: half the RAM is soldered to the motherboard while the other half is a standard removable SODIMM module. I saw this from a bunch of mainstream manufacturers across a wide price range, and I couldn’t really find anything online about this at all.
What’s the idea behind this? Based on my understanding, this seems like it would be the worst of both worlds:
- since half the RAM is soldered, it’s not fully user-upgradeable
- since half the RAM is replaceable, it’s not possible to benefit from the potential higher bandwidth which comes with soldered RAM, nor is it possible to make the device thinner by removing the DIMM latching mechanism
What am I missing? Why would so many manufacturers opt for a solution which seems to be objectively worse than either fully soldered or fully modular RAM?
Just a guess, but probably the motherboard + one (soldered) dimm comes from the factory/supplier as a single SKU. These can be sold for a base price, or some can be upgraded with a second dimm and sold as an upgrade.