In general, single channel memory does have a rather significant affect. Performance was down in many games by 10 to 15 percent, and the biggest losses were up to a 29 percent drop in 1% lows. A handful of games were unaffected by the drop in memory bandwidth, but in general you’ll find most games are at least somewhat susceptible to lowered performance. As I mentioned earlier, to get the most of the Aero 15X you really want that second stick of DDR4.
Compared to a last-gen system with a Core i7-7700HQ, we previously established an average performance gain of around 8 to 10 percent in games with the new Core i7-8750H, provided you have dual-channel memory. However the Aero 15X with its single channel memory struggles to outperform a dual-channel 7700HQ system on average. There are some games that show roughly a 10 percent performance gain, and there are others that actually show a performance decline, and those are the games that are most heavily affected by memory bandwidth.
Interested in storage performance? Well my review model came with a 512GB Toshiba NVMe PCIe SSD, which is actually a bit slower than the 512GB SSD in the original Aero. That said, it still performs well in sequential workloads, and while it’s not as strong as other NVMe drives in random performance, it should suffice for most workloads. Plus there’s a spare M.2 slot if you want to chuck in more storage as just 512GB can be a bit slim.
