Hello Everyone

I am getting into video editing (for my drone footage) and I don't have very meaty hardware. I have two laptops, one is an HP A10 processor with 16GB RAM and an AMD R5 video chip (budget entry level at best). The other is a very old (2011) Dell E6420 with a second generation i5 and 8GB ram, with Intel integrated graphics.

I don't have very meaty hardware to run DaVinci Resolve, which is what I would like to use, but neither machine will run it very well at all. The old Dell actually far outperforms the HP from 2016 and will run lightweight editors (like Openshot) reasonably well. The laptop specs and the memory vendors say that 8GB is the maximum this laptop will take. But, on some of the old Dell forums several people report that this mother board will accept 16GB of RAM and several had successfully upgraded to that level. Apparently, it has a motherboard called "Sandy Ridge" I believe.

The Dell is currently running Ubuntu 20.04, so I ran:

and this was the result:

On another forum, one or two people insisted it was an error and 8GB is indeed the maximum. I assume that command gets its information directly from the mother board and memory controller. I've never known it to give an incorrect reading when run as sudo, but I could be wrong.

Obviously, I don't want to spend the money for the memory sticks if it will be a waste of time. If I can find some cheap memory and try it, I understand that if it does in fact exceed the max, the only consequence is it won't get past the POST until I put the original memory back in.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

I appreciate any replies.

Bob

Oh dear, found this in the man pages:

Pretty useless, then.

Don't know if they are identical to yours, but http://linux-hardware.org lists three profiles of Dell Latitude E6420 with 16GB (1, 2, 3), one with 12GB, and one with 10GB of RAM.

Thank you very much for that. I know that this laptop came with either an i5 or an i7. I don't know if it's just the i5 limited to 8GB, but I am curious about the mistake in the DMIDECODE, if it is in fact an error. I've used that to identify various things in the past and it has always been accurate.

Thanks again,

Bob

This probe https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=06614b2764 contains i5 and 2x8GB RAM.

What are the hardware requirements for this DaVinci. What makes you think adding RAM is the solution, is your computer going swapping?

Thanks for your reply. It isn't just for DaVinci. I wanted to upgrade the RAM anyway. But DaVinci mimimum specs are 8GB with 16GB recommended. But you are correct, a RAM upgrade alone may not be enough. It also states that a dedicated video ram of 2GB or more is required. Even with a RAM upgrade it still may not be enough. But I have friends in the drone world who reportedly use hardware similar to mine with integrated intel graphics and a RAM upgrade helped. I have installed DaVinci in the past and it does run, but any video on the timeline lags and is so choppy it is unusable.

Bob

Thank you, I have seem similar before. I think I am going to find some memory as cheap as I can and try. If it doesn't work, I'll just sell the memory on.

Bob

Just an FYI:

The command "inxi -xxF" will tell you the actual memory installed in the Info: block at the end. "free" will also tell you accurate memory statistics.