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    M17xR4 RAM DDR3L 2133 MHz Black Screen

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by V!rtua-Play3r, May 12, 2018.

  1. V!rtua-Play3r

    V!rtua-Play3r Newbie

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    I upgrade my laptop with an i7 3940xm and 32GB of DDR3L 2133 MHz.
    I have a black screen at POST BIOS when I set the RAM speed to 2133.
    Any idea to solve this problem ?
     
  2. SMGJohn

    SMGJohn Notebook Evangelist

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    No idea why no one has replied to you yet but your CPU only supports maximum 1600MHz so even if you had 3000MHz RAM your CPU would not be able to make any use of it since its max supported speed is only 1,6GHz.
    This is why you only get blackscreen, you gotta turn it down to 1600MHz, always look up the max ram speed supported by the CPU.
     
  3. Mobius 1

    Mobius 1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    My T430 which only support 1333 and 1600 according to official spec sheet supports 2133 memory plug n play.


    This M17x needs tuning to reach that apparently.
     
  4. V!rtua-Play3r

    V!rtua-Play3r Newbie

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    Thank you for your answers.
    I read somewhere that the 3940 can run at 2133 Mhz on a M18x.
    Currently my memory speed is 1866Mhz.
     
  5. SMGJohn

    SMGJohn Notebook Evangelist

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    The i7-3940XM wont physically support 1600MHz so like I said even if you had memory with 3GHz it wont matter the CPU downclocks your ram to its supported speed no matter what you do.
    https://ark.intel.com/products/7109...essor-Extreme-Edition-8M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz

    The ram speed only matters when your CPU is bottlenecked by the GPU for example, so if you stuck a 1070 in your laptop then 1866MHz might actually matter the reason why it fails to boot any higher than that is because the chipset cannot handle those speed, its simply the chipset was never designed to run those higher speeds its kind of like Ryzen 1st gen and its bottlenecked high speed memory channels
     
  6. Solo wing

    Solo wing Notebook Consultant

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  7. ssj92

    ssj92 Neutron Star

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    Also had 2133mhz ram with 3920XM in my old M18x.

    It should work, but yours requires tweaking for some reason.