Memory Mark Score Seems Low

[kam327]

Hi, newbie here, I was shopping for a new laptop for my daughter to use at college next Fall for engineering. I was using this site to find one with a good processor. Found a Dell at Costco with a Ryzen 7 250 with a CPU Mark score of over 25,000 which seems great for a laptop under $1,000. Also has 32 GB of RAM and 2TB SSD which are both larger than average in the $500-1,000 price range. It was $699 on sale. But I installed the Passmark software yesterday and ran it and was disappointed in the Memory Mark score which I suspect dragged down the overall Passmark Rating. When comparing it to a gaming desktop we have, why would the new laptop have such a lower Memory Mark score (48th pctl vs 77th pctl) when it has double the memory size and they're both DDR5?

	Gaming Desktop	NEW LAPTOP
Processor	Intel Core i5-14400F	AMD Ryzen 7 250
Memory (GB)	16	32
Memory Speed (MT/s)	6000	5600
	DDR5	DDR5
Passmark Rating	10870 (96%)	6216 (58%)
CPU Mark	26859 (83%)	23808 (79%)
2D Graphics Mark	1300 (96%)	843 (67%)
3d Graphics Mark	20633 (85%)	4939 (37%)
Memory Mark	3253 (77%)	2756 (48%)
Disk Mark	36159 (91%)	45430 (95%)

[David (PassMark)]

Maybe the RAM clock speed is slow, or maybe it is running in single channel mode?

[kam327]

Maybe the RAM clock speed is slow, or maybe it is running in single channel mode?

Thanks - I checked and it's showing 5600 in both the BIOS and the Windows performance monitor. How do I check if it's in single channel mode?

[kam327]

Oh - single channel means only 1 stick of ram is installed? Yes - Dell installed 1x 32GB stick in this laptop. So that's seriously degrading the performance versus 2x 16GB sticks? Man, I didn't even know to check for that when shopping laptops.

[David (PassMark)]

So that's seriously degrading the performance versus 2x 16GB sticks

Yes.
The manufacturers know this. But they assume most of their customers are too uninformed to know the difference and it saves then a couple of dollars.