M6500 BIOS does not recognize 1600Mhz memory speed

I have a new Dell M6500 laptop. I just replaced all the slower 1300 MHz memory with 16GB of 1600Mhz Kingston memory. When I look in the BIOS, it recognizes the 16GB, but says the speed is still 1300MHz. Have you ever encountered this problem? We are doing lots of processor/memory intensive computations, and want to be sure we are actually taking advantage of the faster memory. Any thoughts?

I called Dell, they gave me a fairly unsatisfactory answer….

Thanks!

 

According to Dell M6500 specifications sheet, 1600MHz DDR 3 SDRAM is only supported up to 8 GB maximum. 1066 and 1333MHz DDR SDRAM is supported up to 32 GB if your laptop has 4 DDR3 RAM slots and you able to acquire the currently pricey 8 GB DDR3 SDRAM chips.

Source:

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/precn/en/dell_precision_m6500_v2_final_1.pdf

Page 2 it will say up to 8 GB DDR3 1600.

Also, only Core i7-9x0QM's can take advantage of 1600MHz RAM as well. Any other Core i7-xx0QM can only use up to 1333. You are better off sticking with 16 GB 1333MHz IMHO as even the i7-9x0QM doesn't get any significant boost off of 1600MHz than from 1333MHz. The greatest speed improvement for RAM is really capacity in the highest regards, even more than Dual/Quad Channeling, CAS Latency or Frequency and this is with real-life application testing over many years. RAM's biggest performance boost is how much you have it in your laptop, while its bandwidth even in the most inefficient setup will still be plenty for 95% of software applications that will using RAM that you won't notice any signs of slowness or any signs of speed improvement than what you go already, other than how much you have in your laptop.

 

and dont get excited over memory speed in SB based laptops. they improved the prefetch and the speed difference is only even minor in synthetic benchmarks and absoluty 0 in real world.

 

If I'm not mistaken, the M6500 won't ever utilize such fast memory as the memory controller in the processor max is 1333 (Clarksfield i7). If you get one with an Arrandale (i3,i5/i7) then the fastest speed is 1066.

Besides is such fast memory a deal breaker? Only in synthetic benchmarks and rendering will you see maybe 1 second shaved off, perhaps even less. A better investment would be an SSD or additional RAM.

 

Only the Extreme quad core CPU can support 1600MHz memory on the M6500.

 

Thanks to all for your replies.

I wish I had known this before I did the upgrade, as I do not have the Extreme processor, so could have just gone with the 1300MHz memeory.

But now I know what to recommend for others in my group who have the same laptop.

Thanks!

 

load them up with as much 1333 ram as the budget allows.