RAM upgrades for an l502x

Okay, so I've got the l502x with the A06 bios revision and I'm looking to upgrade my memory from the stock 6gb 1333mhz. I found a thread on here where one of the posters said they installed 1866 mhz ram in their's with the same bios revision and a 2720qm. Now i also have a 2720qm which supports 1600mhz ram and I was hoping someone could tell me if the memory will run at 1600mhz rather than downclocking to 1333.

thanks in advance

 

The processor model your laptop features does indeed support PC3-12800 (1600MHz) speeds hence providing all the memory you install is of this nomenclature then it will run at 1600MHz. You just can't mix slower and faster DDR3 because if you do then your system will backdrop to the slower speed rating for compatibility purposes.

See Intel® Core™ i7-2720QM Processor (6M Cache, up to 3.30 GHz))

 

Thanks, the only thing is that I've seen mixed reviews about whether or not the bios is locked to 1333mhz. I found a review on newegg of G.Skill ram where someone said they put it in an inspiron 6420 and the memory was recognized as 1600mhz despite all the ram being 1333 that dell lists online. There is also a thread i found on here where someone with the same model put 1866 mhz ram and they said it jumped their WEI from 7.5 to 7.9 implying that the ram was working at the rated speed, which is why I'm a little bit skeptical. And on a side note, would there be a noticeable speed increase going from 6gbs of 1333 to 8gbs of 1600?

 

Given the memory controller is part of the CPU and I don't think locking it's capabilities at the BIOS level is commonly practiced anymore. Normally laptop manufacturer's won't limit the supported RAM frequency though exceptions did exist in the past whether bug related or intentionally i.e. Sony forced DDR to run at 200MHz instead of 266MHz in their GRX series. Fortunately a BIOS update from their later GRX models solved the problem.

Anyhow, yes, you would feel somewhat of a difference but not so much in how you can sense it yourself albeit in benchmarks should you choose to perform them. With 8GB you'll be able to keep all the RAM in what's known as synchronised dual channel mode so all of your RAM in contrast to just some of it will run in pure dual channel mode. Reads and writes to the memory will be faster as your bandwidth will improve. Some software are more sensitive to memory bandwidth than others, i.e. media encoding is a good example. If you can get the upgrade cheap then go for it. Buy the 8GB in matched pairs for best results.

If however you expect games to work noticeably faster with the speedier RAM then don't expect miracles. A little yes but the main bottleneck will remain your graphics card.

 

Thank you for clarifying!

 

You're welcome.