Weird BIOS/RAM Issue

nheather

nheather

nheather

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Joined
19 May 2004
Posts
1,035
Location
Horsham, West Sussex
Hi,

Resurrecting an old Dell Laptop (and XPS 1640).

The laptop supports 1066 PC3 SODIMM RAM.

It came with 4GB (2x2GB of 1066 RAM) and it was happily running at 1066 according to the BIOS and CPU-Z.

I wanted to increase the RAM size so bought 8GB (2x4GB) second hand, it is actually 1600 stuff but was hoping it would run at 1066.

So removed the 4GB and inserted the 8GB. All looking good, ran tests and they all passed, but I noticed that CPU-Z was reporting speed as 800 (2 x 399). But there are plenty of options in the SPD including 1066.

Pretty much expecting it to default to the nominal 800, so went off to the BIOS to select a higher speed. But no go, there are no available settings in the simplistic BIOS.

Out of interest put the original 4GB back in and this is now only detected at 800 (2 x 399) with no way that I can see of setting it back to the 1066 it was running at before I started.

Anyone else seen similar. The 4Gb was definitely running at 1066 but it is 800 now. I can only imagine that there must be some utility or hidden BIOS functions that Dell use to set the speed.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Yes, running the latest BIOS - has been for quite a few years.

It's not the end of the world, doubt there is much real time difference.

TBH if I had only been able to get the 'new' stuff running at 800 but the old stuff ran at 1066 I would have accepted it as a compatiblity issue and just moved on.

It is just the fact that the old stuff was running at 1066 before I took it out, but will now only run at 800 that is really puzzling and is niggling me to find out why.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
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