HP charges an arm and a leg for customizations; I bought it with a 120 GB M.2 SSD and 16GB of ECC then swapped those out for a Samsung PCIe NVMe M.2 950 Pro and 2x16GB ECC RAM. It has 2x SODIMM slots and each can take up to 32GB, so you could do 64GB if you wanted to.
That upgrade would have cost me around $1000 preconfigured from HP, but since these are real machines that let me actually do what I want to them, I was able to swap them out for myself for $350 - and that's before recuperating the costs by selling the parts it came with.
btw, I think the 3940XM is only faster on paper. The E3-1545m has 8GT/s vs the 3940XM's 5GT/s, ~33% more memory bandwidth, and an L4 memory cache.
I've been looking for a similar machine. Wish there were more available with the E3-1545m which is an awesome CPU. In the past I've shied away from HP due to quality concerns. Have the addressed that issue?
So you had to self-upgrade and sell the original parts? That's sad that that is necessary. Did you try contacting HP to see about purchasing a bare-bones machine to avoid getting parts you don't want?
Are both M.2 slots gen3 x4? I was looking at the Dell workstation and was dismayed to find out that only one of slots can work at that speed.
That upgrade would have cost me around $1000 preconfigured from HP, but since these are real machines that let me actually do what I want to them, I was able to swap them out for myself for $350 - and that's before recuperating the costs by selling the parts it came with.
btw, I think the 3940XM is only faster on paper. The E3-1545m has 8GT/s vs the 3940XM's 5GT/s, ~33% more memory bandwidth, and an L4 memory cache.