Hello people of Tom’s Hardware!
First post - I’ve lurked quite a bit in the past and got a lot of answers from this site but have run into a predicament I’m not sure there are any existing posts about, so I’ll dive right in!
I recently acquired a small form factor Lenovo M73 on the cheap. In it was an i5 4460, 4GB DDR3 1600mhz RAM, and a 500GB HDD. I’ve been progressively upgrading it, at present I’ve put in a 300W Seasonic TFX PSU, two SSDs, a Gigabyte 1050 Ti 4GB graphics card, replaced the stock fans with Noctua fans (to keep it silent) and my most recent upgrade is 16GB of HyperX Savage RAM, with advertised speeds of 2400mhz.
Clearly I didn’t do enough research before purchasing the RAM, as whilst the 4460 is a ‘Haswell Refresh’ which (as far as I understand it) is compatible with 2400mhz RAM, the stock Lenovo motherboard doesn’t seem to support XMP, so it’s currently clocked at 1600mhz.
The general vibe I’m getting is that I wouldn’t really notice the difference in RAM speed. But, as I have already got it in the rig, I figure it makes sense to utilise it.
So I have two questions, firstly is there any way to force the Lenovo motherboard to use the higher speed RAM?
I imagine that’s unlikely, so my second question is, is it really worth upgrading the motherboard? Would this benefit me in any way other than being able to use the faster RAM?
The one I have my eye on is this, as I’ve found one cheap on eBay:
www.asrock.com
One other thing that I’ve read is that enabling XMP a can make a system unstable. Is this a problem I’m likely to run into?
Just hoping for some thoughts from some people with more experience than me!
Many thanks,
Sam
First post - I’ve lurked quite a bit in the past and got a lot of answers from this site but have run into a predicament I’m not sure there are any existing posts about, so I’ll dive right in!
I recently acquired a small form factor Lenovo M73 on the cheap. In it was an i5 4460, 4GB DDR3 1600mhz RAM, and a 500GB HDD. I’ve been progressively upgrading it, at present I’ve put in a 300W Seasonic TFX PSU, two SSDs, a Gigabyte 1050 Ti 4GB graphics card, replaced the stock fans with Noctua fans (to keep it silent) and my most recent upgrade is 16GB of HyperX Savage RAM, with advertised speeds of 2400mhz.
Clearly I didn’t do enough research before purchasing the RAM, as whilst the 4460 is a ‘Haswell Refresh’ which (as far as I understand it) is compatible with 2400mhz RAM, the stock Lenovo motherboard doesn’t seem to support XMP, so it’s currently clocked at 1600mhz.
The general vibe I’m getting is that I wouldn’t really notice the difference in RAM speed. But, as I have already got it in the rig, I figure it makes sense to utilise it.
So I have two questions, firstly is there any way to force the Lenovo motherboard to use the higher speed RAM?
I imagine that’s unlikely, so my second question is, is it really worth upgrading the motherboard? Would this benefit me in any way other than being able to use the faster RAM?
The one I have my eye on is this, as I’ve found one cheap on eBay:
ASRock > B85M Pro4
A-Style : Home Cloud; Supports New 4th and 4th Generation Intel Xeon / Core™ i7 / i5 / i3 / Pentium / Celeron Processors (Socket 1150); Supports Intel Small Business Advantage 2.0; All Solid Capacitor design, Digi Power; Supports Dual Channel DDR3/DDR3L 1600; 1 PCIe 3.0 x16, 1 PCIe 2.0 x16...
One other thing that I’ve read is that enabling XMP a can make a system unstable. Is this a problem I’m likely to run into?
Just hoping for some thoughts from some people with more experience than me!
Many thanks,
Sam
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