Laptop benching

[Johan45]

20 points is within run variance, no?

Depends on the CPU for a 8-10 core maybe but not a dual/quad. XTU really likes ram if BB could get that running at 1600 then he'd get another bump in score I bet

 

[batboy]

With some benchmark, sure. But, yesterday I ran it at least 20 times and most of the time it was either the same score or 1 point difference. When I look at the XTU results for this processor on HWBOT, most of the scores are clumped in a tight pattern. My 513 score yesterday would put me at around 47th, this 533 score would move me into 12th place. That's pretty big in my book (keeping in mind this is a 6 year old laptop).

 

[batboy]

XTU really likes ram if BB could get that running at 1600 then he'd get another bump in score I bet

I'm one step ahead of you. I already cancelled the order for the matching Samsung RAM and now I'm looking for a worthy pair of DDR3-1600.

Kingston Hyper-X? Crucial Ballistix? Lots of choices.

Question, on a laptop, will the BIOS auto adjust to tighter timings?

 

[Johan45]

Only answer I can give you is sometimes. If it supports it yes if not then ??? I haven't done too much tinkering with new parts on a laptop

 

[batboy]

LOL... me either. Guess I better look at the manual and maybe check the latest BIOS and see if it says anything about RAM support. I was hoping Sentential might know. Hint, hint.

I just made a laptop new personal best in XTU, I lowered the long term power boost watts and raised the short term boost watts. That would give me 9th place for hardware. I'm always pouring the power on, never thought to lower the watts. Max temp was 76 too, bonus, running cooler, which probably means it's into turbo boost more. I finally think I'm making some progress.

EDIT: I submitted that score and sure enough, I got 9th place. It sure gave me and the team a lot of points (9 hardware points and 5.7 hardware team points).

 

[Sentential]

LOL... me either. Guess I better look at the manual and maybe check the latest BIOS and see if it says anything about RAM support. I was hoping Sentential might know. Hint, hint.

I just made a laptop new personal best in XTU, I lowered the long term power boost watts and raised the short term boost watts. That would give me 9th place for hardware. I'm always pouring the power on, never thought to lower the watts. Max temp was 76 too, bonus, running cooler, which probably means it's into turbo boost more. I finally think I'm making some progress.

EDIT: I submitted that score and sure enough, I got 9th place. It sure gave me and the team a lot of points (9 hardware points and 5.7 hardware team points).

Processor3 and Graphics4  Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM Processor o 2.2 GHz (3.1 GHz with Turbo Boost Technology), 6MB L3 Cache  Mobile Intel® HM65 Express Chipset  Mobile Intel® HD graphics with 64MB-1696MB shared graphics memory Memory5  Configured with 6GB DDR3 1333MHz (max 8GB)  2 main memory slots

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Memory Specifications
Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type)
32 GB
Memory Types
DDR3 1066/1333
Max # of Memory Channels
2
Max Memory Bandwidth
21.3 GB/s
ECC Memory Supported ‡
No

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Going off of ARK and the manual you provided it appears the limit is 8GB per dim with two available with a max of 1333 and it doesn't specify if DDR3L is required, I believe that was for Haswell on that needed it.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231531

CL9-9-9 seems to be the lowest I can find and while I'm sure there are ones that can go lower the question is whether or not the laptop supports timing changes; no clue. The above seems to be the cheapest at the egg. Try those or these:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104476

DDR3L probably would be the better option as it would help out the battery life but again I have no idea what the default voltage is and I don't want you blowing up a good set of RAM without knowing. What options does the BIOS have? DDR3L starts at 1.35v versus 1.5 for standard DDR3.


EDIT: Yes Haswell requires DDR3L Sandy does not.

 

[batboy]

Looks like you did a bit of research while I went to town for supplies and ice cream.

I rarely use battery power on a laptop, so conserving battery life means very little.

Sent, I almost choked when I followed that link and saw the price. But, what you linked to was 2X8GB. The 2X4GB was more like I was expecting. I did find basically the same thing except it's Crucial Ballistix for $69 with free shipping. The non-fancy Crucial with bare chips appear to be the same specs and are $64 and can be used at 1.35v or 1.5v, so it'll work in any laptop that supports DDR3 or DDR3L.

I'm using HWinfo64 and lists the timings of the Samsung 1333 RAM I'm using as 9-9-9-24, same as the 1600 stuff we're looking at. The question is, will it run at the 1600 speed? Probably not since the manual says 1333. I'll look at the BIOS notes to see if a later BIOS added additional RAM support.

Johan mentioned trying Throttle Stop. It would not install on my other laptop, but it appears to be working on this one. I have no clue how to use it. More research...

EDIT: HWiinfo shows battery voltage at 11.4v. That seems low to me. Wear level is at 69.6%.

I also found where it should the multiplier for individual cores and they work independently I guess. They don't all change at the same time when boost kicks in. I just looked now and one core is at 30X, two at 29X and one at 28X.

EDIT #2: I found the DIMM voltage, it's 1.5 so it's not the DDR3L. That's ok, a lot of the DDR3L had CL11 instead of CL9.

EDIT #3: This chipset apparently only supports up to DDR3-1333. There was no BIOS update providing support for faster RAM. Most likely, it will not clock the RAM any faster, so I ended up buying 2X4GHz sticks of Samsung DDR3-1333 rated at 9-9-9-24 which was cheaper than the DDR3-1600 I was looking at. So, for $50, I will upgrade from 6GB of single channel RAM to 8 GB of dual channel RAM in two different laptops. Oh, I also added a 250GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD to my shopping cart just for kicks.

EDIT #4: This laptop was dragging butt when I first started. Before I did anything to it, I ran SuperPi 1M and 32M for a baseline. The results were quite sad, 1M = 49.654s and 32M = 32m 28s. After doing a bunch of things as was described in earlier posts, my best scores with SuperPi are now: 1M = 12.850s and 32M = 11m 26.542s.