HP Pavilion 15 Laptop, Skylake i7-6700HQ, no DDR4 slots, but will run DDR3-2133 @ 2133.

Per the subject line:

HP Pavilion 15 notebook, Skylake i7-6700HQ, no DDR4 slots, but will run DDR3-2133 @ 2133. 1920x1080 15.6" IPS panel. No discrete GPU, does have onboard intel 530 HD IGP.

HP, in their infinite cost-cutting wisdom, hobbled my Skylake i7 Pavilion notebook with DDR3-only RAM sockets. So no DDR4 for this poor, bandwidth-starved Skylake i7.

I'm currently running 16GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3L-1600 RAM at CL9. It *will* accept and run DDR3L-2133 memory @ 2133 MHz. The lowest latency DDR3L-2133 RAM I can find is CL11, 16GB (2x8GB) for $108 USD (Kingston HyperX Impact), on Amazon.com

Only reason I'd want to do this is because this notebook did not come with a discrete GPU, but it does have the halfway decent onboard Intel 530 HD IGP, which is, of course, completely at the mercy of the speed and bandwidth of main system memory. The intel 530 IGP is about equal to an nVidia GeForce 920M GPU, but only if the 530 is sitting on DDR4-2133 main system memory. Again, I'm saddled with DDR3-only sockets.

I do some casual gaming on this notebook (mostly older titles, Skyrim, Warcraft, Xonotic), with medium to high settings, 1920x1080 native screen res.), but gameplay does get choppy at times, dropping to around 34 FPS during heavy activity, so I'm wondering if I'd pick up maybe 25% - 33% more fps with my integrated graphics card by going from DDR3L-1600 CL9 to DDR3L-2133 CL11. Going from 34 to 45 fps (on average) would be a fairly sizable improvement.

Is DDR3L-2133 CL11 RAM roughly equal to DDR4-2133 CL11 RAM in overall performance/bandwidth? (I haven't found any DDR3L-2133 with latencies of CL9 or lower. CL11 is the lowest I can find. I've looked high and low, all over the Interwebz).

Obviously it's my money and time to "waste".

 

DDR3 2133MHz sticks working with my I7-6700HQ and it have some positive effects over the regular 1600MHz. Bescause the lower latencies it should be also faster than the DDR4 2133MHz.

 

Thanks for the quick response, JKnows - that's a valuable data point.

 

Yup faster RAM will help with IGP performance.. Should get a 10% performance increase with the 2133Mhz RAM.. Enjoy guys

 

Much appreciated, Tom -

Yeah, you're probably spot on - 10% "real world" improvement. In other words, maybe a minimum of 38 fps in games, instead of 34, and a max of 66 fps instead of 60 (but i usually have vsync on with 60 Hz refresh anyway, so that's kinda pointless). Oh....and "bragging rights" with 25% higher Geekbench 3.0, PassMark and Cinebench R15 scores (mostly due to improved memory-intensive STREAM performance scores with the DDR3-2133 stuff).

Not worth $109 USD, so I'm gonna pass on this one.

Thanks again, TomJGX!