Overclock G73 higher by removing a stick of ram?

I came across something today that I found surprising. Thought I would share.

I have two G73's. One at work (the BB version) and a G73 from MicroCenter at home. (X2 I think???)

Anyway, using SetFSB on my MicroCenter version with 8GB of memory, I have never been able to set the BCLK higher than 150. Going so much as one tick over would automatically cause a BSOD. Every time.

Today for kicks I decided to try out SetFSB on my G73 at work that has only 6GB of ram. Surprisingly, I was able to clock the BCLK up to 160. I was even able to complete a 3DMark 06 run. Which got me thinking.... Would I be able to clock my G73 at home higher if I pulled one stick of memory?

Low and behold, by pulling one stick of memory out of my G73 at home, I was able to suddenly clock the BCLK past 150. I got it up to 164. I didn't run any benches or anything, I was just amazed that I was suddenly able to push it much further because it only had 3 sticks of memory installed versus the 4 it came with.

For me personally, losing 2GB of memory in exchange for a higher overclock is something that I don't know I want to do. Just thought I would post my .02 worth for those that may want to try the same.

 

Yes, when I hit 17K 3DMark06 with my G73 I had 1 stick 1GB memory in my system.

 

I'm guessing it's like this because the memory controller is being taxed too hard when 4 sticks of memory are present?

 

I put in an extra stick into my BB version and I can't hit past 150 too. I will try removing it later.

 

Since I am doing a lot of video encoding I need to try this. 8GB of RAM is almost pointless other than bragging rights. There are a few situations where it can come in handy but none of them would I ever encounter.

Extra CPU speed though is much more handy.

I can get 1.75ghz stable with all 8GB of RAM in place. It takes a x264 encode from about 29fps to 31fps, when an encode can take over an hour 2fps more is a good bit of difference.

With cpu-z I see my cpu speed jump from 1.75ghz to 1.94ghz so at some point I may hit a CPU overclock wall due to the turbo boost multi going up like that at random.

 

Doesn't one of your ultra hi-res background images take up 7.25GB of space? j/k

 

Maybe in TIFF format

Im running BLK 160 right now fro 1.76ghz or so, all 8GB are in and cpu is @ 100% load encoding Conan the Destroyer for me.

If I can get 2ghz with 6GB of RAM that would be sweet.

 

Yes this will happen.

Overclocking stresses the RAM sticks.

Things that happen when you yank a ram stick:
1)It drops all RAM to single channel (halving the overall RAM speed)
2)Dual-channel is sensitive so it becomes more resilient
3)maybe you yanked the stick with the least OC headroom

 

It is a known fact that more slots require more voltage a 2 DIMM set up would offer advantage. Real desktop OC's only play with two. Common sense kids. And we can't adjust the voltage.

 

Too bad the bios isn't compatible with Intel XTU.

 

Is the shareware version of setFSB the only way to overclock?

 

or buy a 920XM.