L702X and 1866Mhz Ram... another possibility - Intel XTU

I'm the proud owner of a L702X. It's been great, and other than a couple driver hick-ups when it arrived, I've had no real issues at all. That being said, I've found two things to be very disappointing - especially since they are two reasons why I chose the L702X over an HP Envy.

1. No RAID. The fact that Dell paid extra for the Intel HM67 chipset and then didn't enable RAID is just plain stupid in my opinion. If this were the plan from conception, why not stick with the HM65 chipset and save the end user a few bucks at the register. Enabled RAID is not likely to ever happen, so I'll add an SSD and make my peace with it.

2. 1333Mhz Ram. This is the other one that I want to fix. For most people, the ram speed is no big deal, but I intentionally bumped up to a 2760qm processor so that I could run 1600Mhz ram or better. The CPU supports it, the chipset supports it, the L502X gets it, but Dell chose to limit us to 1333Mhz. Yes, I know that in synthetic benchmarks it makes little difference, but in real-world applications like video editing and CAD modeling, it absolutely makes a difference... a big difference in some cases. I want a shot at running 1866Mhz DDR3 on this machine. I would settle for 1600Mhz, but 1333Mhz is unacceptable based on the advertised hardware of the machine.

All that being said, I have been reading about the HM67 chipset and the laptop version of the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU). This doesn't appear to be available directly from Intel any longer, but it can hopefully still be found circulating in other places. According to Intel, it is designed to work with second generation i7 cpus and the HM67 chipset. The HM65 chipset does not support XTU... another reason why I assumed Dell paid extra for the HM67 chipset.

Has anyone tried XTU to see if faster RAM could be clocked up to 1600 or 1866? Is there a known issue that I'm missing (couldn't find info via search). Lastly, if anyone has a copy of the Laptop version of Intel XTU, let me know as I would be curious to give it a try and see what happens. If this doesn't work, we need to petition Dell to allow the hardware they used to advertise these laptops to reach its full potential (BIOS UPDATE!). After all, the Dell page I bought this on said that it used the HM67 chipset... but it's locked down by Dell and seemingly performs no differently than a HM65 chipset. Eh-hem, False adverstising?

 

Well, I was able to get the desktop version of Intel XTU to load and run without issue. Unfortunately, at least on my system, it only allows CPU overclocking/overvolting. Since I have no shortage of CPU power, this doesn't help me any. All other tuning sections, including memory, were unavailable.

As a result, I have great hope and expectations for those who are learning to edit the UEFI bios... please unlock ram speed for us all!! ... and if you get bored, RAID would be fun too.