Memory tweaking on IFL90 (and other Santa Rosa laptops)

Hi,
I'm happy to report that the new Beta version of MemSet with support of Intel 965PM/GM chipsets is already available here, all the thanks goes to FELIX, the author of this wonderful utility. ( MemSet official discussion thread ).
Here is what I manage to squeeze out of usual 2x1GB PQI DDR667 ram modules.

________________________Default__Tweaked
Reading from memory (MB/s)__5653__5768
Writing to memory (MB/s)____3636__3636
Memory copy (MB/s)________4109__4178
Memory latency (ns)________80,7___77,4

~2%, not so much, but and not so little ether.

Unfortunately CL can’t be change using MemSet, I can be written to SPD thought using SPD Tool, but it’s not so big deal for the bandwidth. After finding timings that are stable for you system, just press saves and they will be loaded automatically every time the system boots. If any problem appears, you can delete program by booting in the safe mode. Happy tweaking everyone.

 

I use another appplication from www.cpuid.com called cpuz for the same purpose, however this application also has information about the processors, motherboard, etc.

Also found a nice application to monitor the temperature; http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

 

Wow Dirt, I love you! +rep for you.

 

Nice job Dirt! This is a nice tweak...

 

marking for future use...

 

how do i use this?

 

Hi, since you got 5-4-3, can't you set tRAS to 12?

 

I can but tRAS is the timing that depends on the other timings value, in this case, the 14 gives the best throughput.
By the way I didn't experiment with almost all timings in "other" category, the performance bust from them is minor but all together they could make the difference. Maybe someone has a good guide on them?

 

The CAS is actually the one affecting peformance the most, you want to keep all of them as small as you can to improve performance, however the tRAS will affect stability more than performance. But if you are trying to overclock your system you also want stability.

Beside the main the main 4 parameters, there are others sub-parameters, but be very careful with them as you may end up getting the blue screen!

 

CAS (CL) is not the most influence timing, it's just ram vendors always write it assuming that the other timings are lower accordingly to it.

For example a quote from here:

As you can see there ar far more timings that are charactarized as "Large Influence on Bandwidth". And it also explains why decreasing tRAS is not effective in my case.

 

hmm, i'll try this out when I pick up another 2GB stick of Patriot. can anyone else confirm the performance increase of these tweaks? Thanks

 

Well I lost some stability with timings, but changed some things and my boot time is a ton faster, as is my Far Cry loading by a little

 

Which timings are the last ones you set?

 

I had it set to 10 and I got BSOD every 5-10min after boot. I bumped it to 12 and it's fine and far Cry loads fast (dunno if it has to do with ram though, just something I noticed)

 

Can you please post all the final timings?

 

Does anyone know if I could/should go lower on any of these values? I don't know what any of this means, but I assume lower = better because some have the word delay?

 

So can someone tell me which are the most balanced perfomance/stability settings please ?

 

I personally don't know, is a try and error process, or try and see what works best.

** WARNING **

Be careful to play with memory timings if you don't know what you are doing. Your computer may freeze if you do it wrongly.

 

It will freeze one way or another, that's what "try and error process" stands for. Different ram may let you use different timings without losing stability. It’s a matter of time to test those all settings and see what is the best for you.

Lowering of timings that I use 100% give a boost to performance, So it's worth setting them as low as they get and your system can let. Best way is to lower one timing at a time and run some stability test for a minute or two. I personally prefer SnM, both for CPU and RAM stability scanning.

 

Hi again, I decided to go a little further and finally coped goats to flash modified SPD to my memory sticks. Since SemMem didn't let me change CAS Letancy and some other interesting timings like tRC the only way was to write this setting right in the memory itself using SPDTool.
The program is really simple. Just press File/Read -> [module number] and memory SPD code will be read to the screen as the HEX code, in the windows below there are some known values that are possible to change.
Since I already known the approximate potential of my memory sticks this was quite easy. These are the settings I changed:
Refresh Rate: Normal 15,625 uS
CAS Letancy Supported: 2,3,4
Minimal Row Precharge Time (tRP): 12ns (T4)
Minimal RAS to CAS delay (tRCD): 12ns (T4)
Minimal Active to Precharge Time (tRAS): 36ns (T12)
Minimal Active to Active/Refresh Time (tRC): 48ns (T16)
Minimal Refresh to Active/Refresh Command Period: 83,25ns (T28)

These are default timings for DDR533 CL4 memory modules. Additionally you can check the actual value of timings in usual metrics in the field below by selecting "Timing Summery".

In MemSet I additionally I lowered tRFC till 16 and Write to Read turnaround clocks till 4. Some other timing differ from the default, because they are calculated by the chipset using CAL Latency value, so by changing CAS Latency you change series of timings as well.

 

Great job, I will have a go with this and see what I can get.
+1

 

Hey, I beginning to flood here, today I upgraded to PQI DDR800 CL5 2x2 GB sticks. The thirst thin that surprised me is that while operating in DDR667 mode CL dropped to 4 DRAM clocks by default. I borrowed A-DATA DDR800 2 GB earlier and the timing where much worse.
Well, the timing OC improved too. I easily flashed 4-3-3-11 timings, and as it seams tRP and tRCD can even be lowered till 2, but unfortunately CL is stuck on 4. When I tried flashing CL3, the system refused to start. To my luck IFL90 is good in eating up memory while being on, so I started the system with only one module with default timings and put another in when Windows was already loaded and backed up settings.
Some beta timing was available for adjustment now so here the final I get...

 

I've some questions:

SPDTool
is for writing the CL Timings hard in the RAM?? Does I have to reboot to get the new settings working?

MemSet
is for changing the CL Timings in Windows? And it works on the fly?


Is MemSet neede for SPDTool? Or worked SPDTool before the new MemSet Tool was released?

 

As I know the changes are as soon as you hit enter. The reason I'm saying this is that I have tried and my laptop froze right away.

 

I just did some more changes with Memset and got ridiculously low. I do not know much about these settings, but I assume lower = better so I went as low as I could....and this is what I got




Are there any values I should change?

 

I used everest to benchmark my ram with those settings and my default ram timings, which is better (I dont know if more or less is better)

Lower Timings
--------------
Read - 3280 mb/s
Write - 1426 mb/s
Latency - 122.9 ns


Default
--------------
Read - 5376 mb/s
Write - 1867 mb/s
Latency - 85.6 ns

 

Lol nvm, changed refresh mode select and that made my pc faster

 

SPD Tool is for editing memory SPD itself, some sort of RAM Bios. According to SPD settings Chipset sets its timings (those from MemSet)
For example:

MemSet can't change CAS Latency because it's the main timing and so does tRC but I don't know if it is used by 965pm/gm chipsets at all.

Too bad TS read Delay doesn't work, it's the same for "Performance level", real massive performance improvment.

 

Lower IS better.

 

Actually, my benchmarks show that I get WORSE performance with a lower refresh mode select than a higher one. For everything else, lower = better.

 

When I tweak my memory, two things happens; 1. They changes go away when a re-boot the laptop, and 2. When I change the RAS to 3 my laptop freezes.

 

Wirelessman
Make sure you pressed Save after setting the timings (the button will change to "Del.Save"). If you did, make sure the folder on the C disk called MemSave isn't set to Read-Only. Then Delete and Save new timing again.
Sometimes they fall down thought, so it's a good idea to make that MemSave read only again.

I noticed that MemSet being in auto start makes rundll32.exe failure in Vista 64bit. Though while loading with delay it runs smoothly. So I build a little tweak to delay MemSet load to 10 seconds after startup. Just extract zip content into MemSave folder and manually replays shortcut to MemSav.exe with newly made MemSet.ink (shortcut file in the archive) in Start Menu->Programs->Startup.

 

Ok, thank you.

I'm just going to repeat your instructions to make sure I understand.

The new times set they are not automatically set, the booting file will have to execute the memset application each time at boot.

This means that tweaking the memory times will not speed the booting process.

Also, it looks like is good to create a delay fro the memset application to run after the desktop is set to avoid conflicts

 

Yes, the settings are set only after MemSet configuration file is executed.

Correct, unless you flash new timings into memory SPD, then they would be set as soon as BIOS reads them.

 

What is the memory SPD?

 

The memory SPD is what the bios reads off of the memory to tell how fast to run everything. Some of the things stored in the SPD are operating voltage and timings for each speed the memory can run at (533mhz, 667mhz...).

 

Is this memory spd a flash memory chipset part of the RAM?

 

I found the answer to my question above, but it seems that this module is an EEPROM, which means it cannot be modified.

 

Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory

 

So, how do you Electrically modify it, do I need a special program?

 

SPDTool does the programing job.

 

Ok, so let me summarize this; memset will temporarily change the memory timings when the laptop is on, SPDT tool will change the timings whether the laptop is on or off.

 

Yes, memset should be loaded to modify chipset timings loaded in memory every time pc is restarted, spdtool makes permanent changes. Cause the timings themselves are being set according to SPD.

 

Thank you, actually Evert does shows trhem separetely, the RAM and the SPD. Thanks!

 

SPDT tool guide pleace!!!

 

Here you can download it.

http://www.techpowerup.com/spdtool/SPDTool_055.zip

 

First, I want to thank Dirt so much for this information.

I was able to successfully lower my Memory settings from 5-5-5-15 to 4-4-3-12 on my OCZ DDR666

For the SPD tool, when you click File -> Read, make sure you do Save and back up both modules as module1orig and module2orig just in case anything go wrong.

Once you've done that, go to File -> Read on each one, change the CAS from 3, 4, 5 to 2, 3, 4 using the drop down menu. But please remember, use this at your own risk. It SHOULD work without any problems, but I can't guarantee anything. Changing the CAS is the ONLY thing I recommend changing with SPDTool unless you know what you are doing. After you make that change to the drop down menu, click outside of the menu to make sure it registers the change. Then go to Write, and choose the correct Module (be aware you will get a checksum aware but that's normal)

Below are the absolute best settings I was able to get without freezing or crashing windows, my benchmarks have improved drastically.

Dirt, I'm not sure why you were increasing the refresh rate from 7,8us to 15,6us, but 7,8us is lower the 15,6us.

Hope this helps someone else, thanks again Dirt and everyone else in the thread.

MemSet Settings
Memory Benchmark

 

I tried spd tool and like a lot of people its not obvious what it all means so as you suggested illmatic8 I tried changing the CAS from 345 to 234 but actually got reduced performance with everest so went back dont want to mess with spd tool too much incase I brick my memory
Also did a few tests with memset and get better performance with 15,6 than 7,8 for some reason. My setup is pretty much the same as yours illmatic8 accept Ive got the T7800.

 

Just tweaked my ram with memset 4.0 beta version. Ram speeds has been improved.

defaut:
Read 5071 mb\s
Write 1885 mb\s
Memory latency 91.9 ns

Tweaked:
Read: 5358 mb\s
Write: 1944 mb\s
Memory latency 86.0 ns

 

Yep, you're right about the Refresh Rate, I realized this shortly after I had made my post. FELIX, the creator of MemSet, confirmed this in the MemSet thread that 15,6 gives better performance than 7,8.

I ran Prime95 for 9 hours and it passed successfully with no errors. So I'm guessing the system is stable with these settings. I used MemTest86+ 2.11 and it found lots of errors in Test 6, but if Prime95 found no errors in 9 hours, I don't really care what MemTest86 says.

These are my new benches with 4-4-3-12 with 15,6 refresh rate. I was able to put all those settings into SPD tool so I don't really need MemSet anymore, but I still use it for those other settings that SPDTool doesn't set.