New Aurora R6 ordered but I might have made a booboo - advice?

OK I've loved Alienware since the very beginning when a mate bought their first laptop series around 1998 but I could rarely afford them! I did buy a refurbed Alienware M17R2 around 2009 and have loved it since then and still use it. I have tended to buy laptops in recent years but I'm keen to get into Elite Dangerous in VR, I play a lot of Rocksmith through my home cinema system (which my current Toshiba laptop struggles with) and as a photographer who shoots full frame 35mm DSLR sometimes professionally I need a faster machine for editing in Lightroom. All of these things are done in my main living room at home so I realised I didn't need a laptop for them!

Last weekend I ordered a brand new Alienware Aurora R6 and I'm really really excited to be rejoining the fold. They ran a 12% discount in Europe until Sunday plus I found a great spec combination on their website that seemed to work out cheaper than configuring the same spec any other way. I think however I may have made a mistake when ordering memory and would welcome your advice:

Here's the spec:

Intel® Core™ i7-7700 Processor (4-Cores, 8MB Cache, Turbo Boost 2.0, up to 4.2GHz)
Windows 10 Pro 64bit English, Dutch, French, German, Italian
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX™ 1080 with 8GB GDDR5X
16GB, 2400MHz, DDR4
256GB M.2 Solid State Drive + 2TB 7200 rpm Hard Drive
BDRE Drive (Reads and Writes to Blu-Ray disks)
Intel® 3165 1x1 802.11ac Wi-Fi Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.2
850W PSU Liquid Cooled W/Odd
UK/Irish (QWERTY) Alienware Multimedia Keyboard
Alienware Standard Optical Mouse
1Yr Premium Support with Onsite Service

The problem is that their sales support were closed over the weekend and when I specced a single stick of 16GB memory I wasn't aware this had a performance penalty compared to 2x8GB sticks and there was nobody I could call at Dell to ask. Both options were the same price.

I was originally thinking that eventually when RAM prices come down I might like to move to 32GB and it would be cheaper and more convenient to do that with a single 16GB stick in place.

I called Dell on Monday to see if I could change the order and they said no - after I pressured the agent she sent a message to somebody who then came back to me and said yes you can change the order but for about £80 extra!! Given the two memory options were the same price at the time of ordering and they haven't started building the machine yet this seems pretty excessive!! It's nearly as much as buying another 16GB from Kingston or Crucial and bunging it in there for a matched pair.

So - given what I plan to use the machine for have I really badly crippled my rig??? Some people say that the real world performance hit will actually only be about 5% because memory bandwidth is so rarely a limiting factor anyway.

What should I do?

Jon

 

this place is dead for desktop owners, find your peers here & perhaps an answer in this post: Aurora R6 Memory, Why a single DIMM?

 

Thanks Cass - I thought it was strange not to get a reply! many thanks for the info too. I guess when my bank balance recovers I could just add a second stick of memory anyway.

Jon