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I've been researching for a new notebook and I'm really frustrated with trying to find a nice Intel Haswell machine that can take more than 16 gigs. I don't want to be stuck there in a few years.

I've looked at Lenovo's T-series, iBuyPower's M1771-2 and the Haswell refresh of the 15" MacBook Pro Retina.

Is this a limitation of the chipsets that are out there or just the Haswell architecture?

Hennes
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Daniel A. White
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  • I have 32GB memory in my current system using Haswell hardware. Sounds like the laptops are not using the correct Haswell chipset you require. Of course I don't have a laptop, the chipsets sold in laptops are different then the desktop variations both because of design and power limitations. The memory limitations are imposed by both the motherboard ( chipset ) and the CPU itself. http://ark.intel.com/products/75133 has 32Gb of support – Ramhound Nov 01 '13 at 00:32
  • Valkyrie CZ-27 17.3" has a 32GB configuration took literally 20 seconds to look at a non-ultra thing laptop to discover that. – Ramhound Nov 01 '13 at 00:38

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There's a third possibility - you can't fit more than 8gb per stick on most modern, consumer systems (and I'm not even sure 16gb sodimms exist - they would be rather expensive too) and 2 sticks of ram on a regular laptop. Most modern full atx desktops will quite happily go to 32 gigs on 4 sticks of ram with 8gb each.

The haswell chipsets shouldn't have issues with more ram, its a physical design, and availability issue more than anything else. At some point of time, compromises need to be made for size.

Journeyman Geek
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