Laptop memory upgrade.

[Fathom1990]

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro A120. It came with a single stick of DDR2 533, but the manual says that it supports DDR2 667. However when I put a couple of sticks of DDR2 667 in they would only run at 533Mhz.

There are no options in the BIOS, and I have been unable to find any software tools to set memory speeds.

A friend told me that the choice of DDR2 400/533/667 might be determined by a resistor soldered onto the board, can anyone confirm this? or as a second best point me to a software tools that would let me switch to the correct memory speed once in windows?

[thideras]

Well, are you seeing a huge performance hit?

I am in the same boat you are...kind of

I have a Toshiba P100 and I have 2 gigs of 533 memory in it (they sent me that instead of 667 :rolleyes:) and I notice NO performance hit at all. I play games and do photoshop...I've noticed no difference.

And about it being a resistor on the board...huh? That doesn't make sense, part of your MB's POST is to check how much and what speed your RAM is. Then the chipset sets the divider.

[Fathom1990]

The RAM is definitely running at 533Mhz.

I want to squeeze every bit of performance out of it for playing Battlefield 2, and even after applying every tweak I have come across and even setting aside a heavily nlited virgin Windows XP install just for BF2 and CS:S, Battlefield still won't run quite as well as I would like.

Now I overclocked the Xpress 200M by a bit over 100% but the performance boost was negligible and I figured that this was because the GPU is starved for memory bandwidth as surely even a crap GPU should scale somewhat with a doubling of clockspeed.

[thideras]

The RAM is definitely running at 533Mhz.

I want to squeeze every bit of performance out of it for playing Battlefield 2, and even after applying every tweak I have come across and even setting aside a heavily nlited virgin Windows XP install just for BF2 and CS:S, Battlefield still won't run quite as well as I would like.

Now I overclocked the Xpress 200M by a bit over 100% but the performance boost was negligible and I figured that this was because the GPU is starved for memory bandwidth as surely even a crap GPU should scale somewhat with a doubling of clockspeed.Well, I'd say the biggest hit to performance is that video card. Plus, a 100% overclock? How are you acheiving this? I'm not saying I don't believe you, but do you have proof that it is actually using those speeds? I know stock it is 350MHz, so your telling me your running it at 700mhz?

[>HyperlogiK<]

I gave him the laptop and I had been having similar issues. The Sat Pro's are intended for business users and Toshiba ships the A120 with the Xpress 200M running at only 200Mhz. I think I could hit about 520Mhz with ATItool before artefacts became a serious issue. Like f@thom said, even though the card sucks balls there should be more than a few % increase in 3D performance with a doubling of clock rate.

To be honest I just gave up on the thing. :)