Dell Inspiron 7352 with 16G DDR3L single SODIMM RAM – it works!

What a great piece of hardware is Dell Inspiron 7352! In the year 2015, this laptop was on the market with 8G DDR3L SODIMM and this was the maximum single SODIMM RAM available at the moment! Still, DELL had decided to make this laptop with memory slot not soldered on the motherboard! After around two years Crucial made available a single 16G DDR3L SODIMM – Crucial CT25664BF160B DDR3L 1600 MT/s PC3L-12800 SODIMM 204 Pin Memory 16gb and DELL made a BIOS update, which made the laptop to support 16G RAM!
This article is to confirm that

DELL Inspiron 13 7352 laptop (i7-5500U 2.40GHz) works perfectly with Crucial 16G DDR3L!

The BIOS is A08 (11/13/2015), probably it would work with all later version after A08, too! At present, there are newer BIOS versions, but we haven’t flashed our BIOS yet!

Hardware Information

    description: Notebook
    product: Inspiron 7352 (06B5)
    vendor: Dell Inc.
    version: A08
    serial: 1111111
    width: 4294967295 bits
    capabilities: smbios-2.7 dmi-2.7 smp vsyscall32
    configuration: administrator_password=disabled boot=normal chassis=notebook sku=06B5 uuid=44454C4C-4C00-1030-8056-B1C04F443332
  *-core
       description: Motherboard
       product: 0N0DFW
       vendor: Dell Inc.
       physical id: 0
       version: A00
       serial: .1111111.xxxx.
       slot: Type2 - Board Chassis Location
     *-firmware
          description: BIOS
          vendor: Dell Inc.
          physical id: 0
          version: A08
          date: 11/13/2015
          size: 128KiB
          capacity: 6080KiB
          capabilities: pci upgrade shadowing cdboot bootselect edd int13floppynec int13floppytoshiba int13floppy360 int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int9keyboard int10video acpi usb biosbootspecification uefi
     *-cpu
          description: CPU
          product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5500U CPU @ 2.40GHz
          vendor: Intel Corp.
          physical id: 4
          bus info: cpu@0
          version: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5500U CPU @ 2.40GHz
          serial: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
          slot: U3E1
          size: 2927MHz
          capacity: 3GHz
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 100MHz
          capabilities: x86-64 fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 sdbg fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm 3dnowprefetch cpuid_fault epb invpcid_single pti tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid ept_ad fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid rdseed adx smap intel_pt xsaveopt dtherm ida arat pln pts cpufreq
          configuration: cores=2 enabledcores=2 threads=4
        *-cache:0
             description: L1 cache
             physical id: 6
             slot: L1 Cache
             size: 32KiB
             capacity: 32KiB
             capabilities: synchronous internal write-back instruction
             configuration: level=1
        *-cache:1
             description: L2 cache
             physical id: 7
             slot: L2 Cache
             size: 256KiB
             capacity: 256KiB
             capabilities: synchronous internal write-back unified
             configuration: level=2
        *-cache:2
             description: L3 cache
             physical id: 8
             slot: L3 Cache
             size: 4MiB
             capacity: 4MiB
             capabilities: synchronous internal write-back unified
             configuration: level=3
     *-cache
          description: L1 cache
          physical id: 5
          slot: L1 Cache
          size: 32KiB
          capacity: 32KiB
          capabilities: synchronous internal write-back data
          configuration: level=1
     *-memory
          description: System Memory
          physical id: 26
          slot: System board or motherboard
          size: 16GiB
        *-bank
             description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1600 MHz (0.6 ns)
             product: 16KTF2G64HZ-1G6A1
             vendor: Micron
             physical id: 0
             serial: 28248586
             slot: ChannelA-DIMM_A
             size: 16GiB
             width: 64 bits
             clock: 1600MHz (0.6ns)

And after the upgrade, you have a spare 8G DDR3L SODIMM (in our case) for let’s say your fanless Intel NUK!

SCREENSHOT 1) The DELL original 8G DDR3L SODIMM RAM, which ships from DELL.

SCREENSHOT 2) The new SODDIM placed in Dell Inspiron 7352 and it works like a charm.

What an upgrade to your laptop 2 years later and even more! We upgraded our laptops 4 years later from 8 to 16G and with the specs of i7-5500u, 16G, SSD with 1T (nowadays these SSDs are so cheap!) and only 1.6 kilos is a killer! This laptop and many of the kind with

NOT soldered RAM and storage

are so easy to extend their life and even compete with middle price range laptops in 2019 – 4 years later! Compare this with the nowadays solder everything to save 1mm or 2 and 100g or 200g more (for some of the parts is even less like RAM! Look at the pictures above, the slot does not occupy much space than the space of a soldered RAM DIMM would do and probably it would be 1mm thicker than the soldered DIMM)

Most laptops with 16G RAM are not cheap and those with less are most likely with soldered RAM and no slot to upgrade!