Latitude D610: memory clock dropped to 100Mhz

Hi,

I'm trying to help out a friend with his D610. His machine is configured as follows:

Celeron M 380 ( link) @ 1.6Ghz (100 x 16)
2 x 512MB DDR2
ATI Mobility Radeon X300
Hitachi 60GB SATA drive
Win XP

Here are some CPU-Z shots:







The HDD is healthy:



My friend complains that his system has been slow lately. He says he mainly notices it when watching videos on the web and when browsing his photos in Windows Explorer.

I tend to agree with him. I don't think it was this slow when I installed the OS for him in ~2007, plus I've changed the AV from AVG to Avira, which is less bloated. The CPU seems to max out at 100% all too often.

At first glance, nothing seemed wrong. The OS is up to date, all drivers are installed (here's a link to Dell for your reference), and there are no viruses or heavy applications in the background. I also verified that the HDD has not reverted to PIO mode.

It took me some time to notice that the power saving scheme was set to "Minimal Power," which is known to cause throttling in some configurations, so I changed it to "Laptop" and rebooted. That didn't help, though.

Upon closer inspection, I realized that the RAM is operating much slower than its nominal speed. The base clock, according to CPU-Z, is 100MHz, which is DDR2-200!

Now, as you can see in the SPD screeshots above, the DIMMs do not share the same capabilities, but both should be able to do 266Mhz (DDR2-533). This is also supported by the chipset.

I'm at a loss as to why this happens. I checked the BIOS, where Dell says the memory is 400Mhz (I assume they mean effective clock). Why not 533, though? The BIOS didn't let me change anything. I also fired up memtest+ 1.7, and it reported 148MHz / DDR2-297 clock for the DRAM. This is better than the 100Mhz I see in Windows, but still well below where it should be. It's also weird that the frequency was different in memtest.

How would I go about correcting this? I tried taking out one of the modules. That didn't help the frequency, but the BIOS saw the change and reported a single channel configuration. The other slot is not quite accessible, I'll have to remove the keyboard to access it ( link), and I'm reluctant to do this. Will I be OK if I proceed carefully? I have a 2 x 1GB DDR2-800 kit that I can use instead.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks

 

Ok, the Celeron's at fault.

This one got me a bit curious so I dropped a Celeron 370 into my D610. Sure enough, I had my memory running at 100MHz as well! I'm running BIOS A06, and I bet it just isn't smart enough to figure out what the heck to do with that Celeron 370 as the D610 never shipped with a Celeron option. Re-installing my Pentium M 750 puts the memory back at 266MHz - normal speed for this machine.

So do your friend a favor, scrap the Celeron and pick up a cheap 533MHz FSB Pentium M.

 

I would never have found that out myself. Thanks a lot for your precious reply.

My friend bought this system second-hand, so it's possible it did not originally ship with the Celeron. He did get it from an official Dell reseller, though.

Sure, I would love to upgrade the processor. I read up a bit and learned that my options would be in the Pentium M 7x0 range: 730, 740, 750, 760, 770 and 780 ( link).

The TDP is a bit higher on these chips compared to the Celeron (27 vs 21), but the Pentium OTOH is SpeedStep-enabled, so would it be reasonable to expect less noise/heat in general use? Not that he complained, but I'm curious.

 

Try the BSEL mod to get it up to speed.

 

Do that.

And it'll be fun, too.

 

LOL not to mention dangerous... u might kill ur laptop.... much better to get the pentium M... better to be safe than to be sorry...

 

You can also undervolt the Pentium M. Under such conditions, the Pentium M will draw significantly less power than the Celeron.

Even at stock voltage, it should draw less power and run cooler than the Celeron thanks to SpeedStep. The D610 is designed to take all 27W of a 533MHz FSB Pentium M, so there's really nothing to worry about.

 

Well, honestly it *will not* kill the laptop.

At worst, the laptop might BSOD, but then you can take out the wire, and the FSB will be back at 400MHz..

 

LOL 10 Char...

 

I do not understand what is so funny..

Have you even done this before?

 

well here's the funny part... it is more likely to fail than to succeed and not to mention you can kill your notebook so no point taking the risk.... and the LOL refered to the 10 char... LOLZ

 

Please explain. Just how can you kill a notebook by doing a pin-mod?

You don't even need to pull off any pins on the CPU to do the 915PM/GM's BSEL trick... there is nothing that you do that is not reversible.