Faster Ram

[indicium]

I installed some Corsair Vengeance PC3-17000, 2133 MHz SO-DIMM's today and had an interesting experience. When first installed, they were both in the slots under the keyboard and the W530 wouldn't even POST. So I immediately thought that they wouldn't work in it, however I decided to see if maybe one of them was bad. I removed one and the machine booted up fine, at this point I swapped out the other s0-dimm and it also booted and ran fine. Then I tried moving one into the slots on the bottom and my first choice didn't work but putting it in the other slot worked great and CPU-Z reported that they were operating at 2130 MHz. The odd thing about this was that I had to put the DIMM's into Slots 0 and 1 for them to work together. When I originally bought the Crucial PC3-12800 (1600 MHz) and then the Crucial Ballastix Sport PC3-14900 (1866 MHz), I only purchased 16 GB the first time and put both under the keyboard and they worked perfectly. This made it easier when I got the additional RAM and could install it on the bottom. Now to order the additional RAM and get back to 32 GB and move the Ballastix to the work W530.

You gotta love XMP RAM!

[WizardOfBoz]

This is interesting. Just to be sure I understand, you are saying that the W530 will tolerate the overspeced XMP memory, but it depends upon which socket yo put it in. Yes? Are you also saying that the W530 can exploit the XMP (e.g. by amping up the clock rate from 1600 to 1833 and 2/3, or whatever XMP supports)? Did I get this right?

I saw a post on the Lenovo site where a guy claimed that he'd added

32 GB Crucial Ballistix PC3-14900 (1866 MHz) which works great in both. They run at 1864 MHz (932 MHz x2). The intel chipset supports XMP which allow the RAM to fun at its stated speed and net be clocked down.

If this is true, any downside to installing the PC3-14900 in my W530? Is the memory clock-rate constant or dependent upon load? Will my battery life suffer? How much of a boost will this give my numeric intensive programs? Will thermal mgmt be an issue? I do run some numerically intensive stuff (half-hour to two-hour runs, lots of number crunching). So it matters.

Thanks!

W530, i7-3820QM, 8Gb (currently) RAM, Samsung 850 Pro 512Gb, K2000M, 1080p, Win 7 Pro 64.

[StevenD]

Hi. I have a question about faster RAM, too. I'm in the market for probably a W541. I was going to replace their 4GB with much more, purchased elsewhere for a better price. Is there a problem with replacing their 1600 ram with the fastest I can find? How do I know what is compatible, and whether the faster speed will be used by the computer, or make a difference if it is used?

[indicium]

I'm not sure about the W541, but on the W530, I found out that it would accept higher speed memory that had XMP. I'm using PC3-14900 1866 MHz in XMP mode with no problem and I find that it is faster for my needs. I did try the PC3-17000 2133 MHz SO-DIMM's in my systems but in one it would only use Single Channel and in the other it wouldn't boot and this was XMP also.