Lenovo, in their wisdom (penny pinching I guess), has been soldering either 4 or 8G of ram into the thinkpads for the last few years. This is one of the things that drove me away from them, because it seriously limits the amount of ram that can be installed (vs what is possible) and it messes up any kind of dimm striping one might want to run, as well as restricting you to the generally not great timings of the soldered on ram.
Its irritating and destroys what might otherwise be a pretty desirable machine, compared with any number of less expensive machines that have two DIMM slots.
Yah, I thought that was clear. But if you get one of the machines with 4G soldered, your basically limited to 1/2 the full capacity of the hardware (36G vs 64G IIRC).
edit: Its actually 20-24G max according to the spec sheet, compared with my similar age cheepe dell which does 32G because it has two dimm slots so I have a pair of 16G dimms in it.
I'm not sure that actually works on that machine, the intel specs list 32G max on the chips, which likely if its like some of their other designs caps the individual DIMM channel capacity. I've gone over the lenovo recommended RAM configs before when the intel spec supports it, but intel has been enforcing capacity limits on many of their parts (presumably in the low level binary firmware blobs which refuse to train DIMMs which otherwise might work) for the last few years.
Even so, if you get it working, its the equivalent of 1/2ing your ram bandwidth.
PS: what you probably want is a T480, same generation little thicker, with both ram slots, and the extended battery if one wants a beefier version.
