Upgrading laptop memory, won't run at correct speed.

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro A120. It came with a single stick of DDR2 533, but the manual says that it supports DDR2 667. However when I put a couple of sticks of DDR2 667 in they would only run at 533Mhz.

There are no options in the BIOS, and I have been unable to find any software tools to set memory speeds.

A friend told me that the choice of DDR2 400/533/667 might be determined by a resistor soldered onto the board, can anyone confirm this? or as a second best point me to a software tools that would let me switch to the correct memory speed once in windows?

 

have you been into the bois and checked the speed?

you can usually say you want to set the memory timing manually then just choose 667 out of the menu.

John

 

He said has has been in the BIOS and there are no options there.

What chipset and cpu are in your A120? Also, what program are you using to determine speed, cpu-z?

 

There isn't much of a difference anyways between 553 and 667mhz...if any because it gets canceled by the higher latency of the 667mhz modules...

 

A Radeon Xpress 200M and a Yonah 1024/Celeron M 1.7/533Mhz FSB (running at 2.15Ghz/667Mhz FSB). Altering the FSB with soft FSB doesn't seem effect the memory speed in any way. Yes I am using CPU-Z.

 

soft FSB? FSB modded a Celeron? Nice one! How did you do it?

 

If that 667MHz RAM is running at CL=4 @ 553MHz then you will be getting most of the speed potential.

Use the memory bandwidth benchmark of Sisoftware Sandra to compare the performance.

John

 

Since your Cpu is suppose to run at 533mhz, your ram will too.

 

OK, so I'd need to upgrade to a 667Mhz CPU to get the RAM to run at the correct speed?

moon angel

Not a proper FSB mod, just software (clockgen ghost I think). I got into the bad habit of referring to all software FSB tools as 'soft FSB' after using said program for years on my old K7S5A.