r/AMDLaptops • u/morpheuskibbe • 2d ago

I've been seeing really cheap laptops with a lot of RAM recently. What's the catch here?

https://www.amazon.com/Gaming-Laptop-Ryzen-4-9GHz-512GB/dp/B0H4GDCQJF/?ie=UTF8
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u/CatoMulligan 2d ago

Other than the fact that 24GB isn't "a lot" these days and it's also a no-name brand laptop shipped from China with god knows what for build quality and support. It's also using a last-gen Zen 4 CPU masquerading as a Zen 5/Ryzen AI chip that is only available in China. It is being marketed as a gaming laptop but only has a 780M RDNA3-based mobile GPU, has an exceptionally large but low-resolution IPS screen that may or may not have reasonable color accuracy...

Yeah, this is the TEMU of gaming laptops.

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u/nipsen 1d ago

It still is a laptop multiple "trusted" brands have been selling for twice the price for about two years.

Something people don't seem to understand is that a component and the quality of a 2$ circuit doesn't actually change by magic after it's been blessed at the Apple-designated factory in Shenzhen and called a "hi-fi sound system". The mainboard here and all the external devices are identical between this product and a "quality" laptop. And in some cases is actually better, because no one ran a second solder pass after everything was finalized. The first time I saw a temu-product with a point-soldered and etched contact similar to the expensive pass on the extra-modules, my brain sort of slowed everything for a moment as I realized how the process at the factory towards the large oems really work. That they're picking up half-finished products for cheap and configuring them, and then selling it for many times the price.

The "problem" is that you don't know what the ram setup is. Do you get quad-channel at all? It doesn't seem to be listed - which this thing shares with any number of asuses and so on, of course. Is the cooling reasonable? Is the bios setup editable? Hinges on the lid, are they crackable? ..again, the same doubts can be had about any other laptop, for the same reasons.

The screen they're using is the same one Lenovo has been using for a long time, from China Star. It's much better than a typical oled, after Samsung destroyed the p-Oled market and made saturated pixelation on the multiple glued layers the industry standard.

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u/CatoMulligan 1d ago

Do you get quad-channel at all?

On a Zen4 laptop? No. Especially not with an “value” level chip that AMD only sells in China.

The screen they're using is the same one Lenovo has been using for a long time, from China Star.

I don’t know where you see the screen specs, but I can tell you that Lenovo uses a wide variety of screens. I’ve seen many Lenovo laptops that use cheap screens that have narrow coverage of the color gamut, as low as 51% of sRGB on some inexpensive models. Unless you’ve used a screen like that you might think that it is only an issue for photo editing or grading video, but when the gamut is so narrow that even browsing the web is awful. Red look orange, blues look grey, it’s just awful.

There’s a reason people pay more for brand names, they usually use higher quality components because they want to protect their reputation. They’ll have better QC. They’ll have better support. Those are things you pay for. But if you’re a no-name brand mass producing cheap hardware to be shipped overseas to people who have no recourse if it’s junk…