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Why does the ASUS G74SX (and other computers) come with less RAM than capcity?

They packaged it with 12gb of RAM, but the motherboard holds up to 16gb.

I looked online and the extra 4gb cost about $30. Its seems that this would be a small amount of extra cost for a computer that costs over $1000 and would attract more buyers.

The reason I ask is because I am wondering if the computer functions better in some way with less than 16gb of RAM which means I shouldn't upgrade it (perhaps the "hibernate" feature?). Or perhaps its just some kind of marketing strategy thing so they can sell the ones with 16gb for much more?

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$30 doesn't seem a lot to you, but figure 100,000 units and a likely negotiated rate of $15 for the extra RAM. That would be 1.5 million dollars that ASUS would most likely not recover since they've already priced the laptop to a point that they want. Also, the general market would not see advantages over 4-8GB of Ram since they barely push their computers to begin with. – kobaltz Mar 17 '12 at 14:45

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It costs more to produce and the chances of you actually using 16 GB is very slim. These notebooks are aimed at gamers and it's just a bit of marketing rather than real usage.

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I think you might be right about not using it. I think the only way you would use it would be for editing video or extremely large image files. I don't know much about gaming, but perhaps for that? I just checked my stats, and I'm using only about 15% of the available RAM. I bought the computer because I wanted the large screen and screen resolution in order to be able to view more code on screen. I was also hoping that the powerful hardware would decrease the amount of time to load the debugging server, the lag for which tends to break my concentration. – Chris Dutrow Mar 17 '12 at 20:56

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