Thinkpad T420 Memory Upgrade Problem

Folks - Been searching for a clue, no luck, so I'm hoping you can help.

I just upgraded my new T420 from 2GB-->8GB RAM. Performance in my favorite game (Civilization 4) has become crippled. Within 2 minutes, the cooling fan goes to maximum and display frame-rate drops to jerky. When I minimize the game and open (eg: Firefox), the fan slows down and CPU (on the resource monitor) goes to a minimum.

This problem *did not* exist with the original 2GB of RAM. The game ran perfectly.

Ram Upgrade: Gskill 2x4GB DDR-1333 (PC3-10666) CL9-9-9-24

I have run: Memtest86+, Windows Memory Test, Lenovo Hardware test with all good results. PassMark & Cinebench also returned typical results.

T420 (model 4177)
i5-2410M
Intel HD3000 GPU
1600x900 Display
Windows 7 - 64bit

During the upgrade I went from 2GB-->4GB-->8GB
Windows Experience Memory went: 5.5-->5.9-->7.4
HD3000 Memory Allocation went: 775MB-->1.7GB-->3.76GB

The driver for the IntelHD3000 is up-to-date (8.15.10.2342)

Does anyone have any ideas? Any other tests I should be running? I'm about to remove one of the DIMM's to go to 4GB and see what happens, but first I thought I'd ask the hive.

Thanks-Frisbee

 

That sound like a good first step.

 

I don't have any clue about your problem but if you can manually set HD3000 memory allocation maybe fix that to something like 512MB or 1GB. This integrated GPU doens't benefit much from large vedio memory size beyond 512MB IMO.

 

This is likely unrelated to your problem, but the latest Intel HD 3000 driver is in fact 8.15.10.2361, released on April 13.

 

Did you try putting back the original memory and see if you ran into issues? Even if memory passes memtest, it may still be finicky with your IMC.

 

Well, I've tried all the configurations of 2GB, 4GB#1, & 4GB#2 in various DIMM slots and combinations. The problem only manifests itself when I'm in the 8GB combination.

2GB + either 4GB works fine. Each of the 4GB individually works fine (tried each DIMM in each slot). This leads me to conclude the DIMM's are OK and the slots are OK. Maybe it's a quirk of Civilization (I posted on a game forum asking for technical help).

I'm currently running 2+4GB and will probably leave it that way. This is a strange one - Maybe one day I'll figure it out.

Thanks to everyone for their help.

While I'm at it, if anyone knows the source of this boot up error warning and whether it needs to be fixed, let me know (I saw it from day 1 but google didn't provide an immediate answer):

PXE-E61 - Media Test Fail
PXE-M0F - Exiting Intel Boot Agent

 

PXE is network boot. It's complaining you don't have a wired cable connected to the ethernet port, and then it quits. Check you BIOS boot order and disable network booting.

As for the memory situation, how about running a memory test? An easy way is to use the one that's on a windows setup DVD. Another way is to burn a CD copy of memtest86 That'll let you boot right into the memory test.

 

Thanks for the tip on PXE.

I had run the various memory tests - to no avail (see first post), but I appreciate the advice.

Something is definitely wrong, I just don't know what. CIV4 is old, so there might be a compatibility problem somewhere. I'm going downgrade to DX9 to see if that makes a difference (people are running this on Asus EEE Netbooks, so a T420 shouldn't sweat).

--Frisbee.