Could my ram be the bottleneck?

[andynerd]

I Overclocked my cpu in my laptop (no flaming comments please) and I haven't noticed a major difference. I did the same with my older laptop and there was a huge difference. Thing is though my old laptop went from 1.5ghz to 2ghz and my new laptop went from 1.8ghz to 2.7ghz and there isn't much performance gain in the new laptop. They both have ram modules that are ddr2 running at 333mhz. Could that be the bottleneck? Would I see a huge or decent performance gain from 667 mhz ram or 800 mhz ram?

[MpG]

I can't imagine why someone would criticize you for overclocking something around here.

At any rate, what are you using as a metric for measuring your laptops' performance?

[andynerd]

Oh in all honesty just the over all performance, the fact that I didn't gain a single fps out of world of warcraft and that the ORTHOS cpu stress test didn't seem to improve much compared to before. If you have any suggestions of cpu tester I would love to hear them.

And It's overclocking of a laptop man everyone get's flamed for that usually! I don't know if it's really an overclock anyway it was just a Pin and Voltage mod.

[_dangtx_]

good god thats a nice overclock. hell probably the best ive heard off without any mods!

[andynerd]

Originally Posted by _dangtx_

good god thats a nice overclock. hell probably the best ive heard off without any mods!

Lol it was a mod xD BSEL Mod on a socket P explained with photos

It was a pin mod upping the bus speed from 133 to 200. And it runs stable 45 degrees idle 75 degrees on load. I know it's a big jump but it's stable and hardly ever get's that hot anyway. The heat sink when it's at 75 is mild to the touch so i don't know maybe I messed my temp sensor.

[MpG]

Dunno. I think people around are always happy to see non-typical overclocking. Of course, if you bork the hardware, our sympathy has it's limits too. That's just the way the overclocking game is played.

Anyway, first thing, you've verified that the processor is definitely running faster? Say, with CPU-Z or something similar? Just to make sure the mod actually worked.

Beyond that, the two biggest bottlenecks in gaming and general usage are the hard disks and graphics cards, usually even moreso on a laptop, with their cut-down/integrated GPU's and 2.5" HDD's. So it's quite possible that it wasn't your CPU that was holding you back in the first place. And if that CPU increase wasn't doing anything for you, I'd expect very little from faster RAM.

[andynerd]

Alright then thank you for that xD and don't worry I don't expect any sympathy if the hardware breaks that's the risk but it's stable and cool so I'm not worried it's a tough old girl. Could the hard drive be slowing down because of age or because it needs to be defraged (it's a windows 7 pc don't know if they still do that) Or is it the Sata chipset build in that's slow?

Don't know if this is important but when a lot of data is being transferred it makes a quiet high pitched sequel could this be a sign of the heads crashing?

Just analyzed the disk and it's only 5% fragmented which i assume isn't bad so it might be the drive :/ I have a 2.5 20gb sata from an xbox hdd I took apart and re serviced xD so maybe I should swap it in with a copy of windows on it.

[_dangtx_]

well run something that impacts the score based upon the clock frequency directly. if that makes no difference(impossible unless the utility is already maxed out) try the whole lot as above to check.

[andynerd]

Originally Posted by _dangtx_

well run something that impacts the score based upon the clock frequency directly. if that makes no difference(impossible unless the utility is already maxed out) try the whole lot as above to check.

Oh right I forgot to mention I have used CPU-z here is the picture, windows also recognizes it's at 2.79 and the windows rating actually went up from 4 to 4.7 so it must be running faster. But when I re ran the windows rating thing it said my hdd was at a 5.6 which is fairly good. I know my graphics are at 3 and that is the problem but by increasing the ram and the ram having a higher bandwidth the graphics should improve because it shares the ram. If that doesn't help maybe i can find an extremely small and cheap PCIe x1 video card and swap it with my wireless card. Or something like that, hope i don't need a video card! But who knows maybe i can get one reeeaaalllyy cheap xD!

[frontier204]

I think you're confusing the actual clock speed of the RAM with the Data Rate.The data rate of the RAM, which is used when they say the RAM is DDR2-800 or something is actually TWICE the actual clock speed of the RAM (and 4 times if you go to say... GDDR5 on a graphics card). So a DDR2-667 module runs at 333 MHz, a DDR2-800 module runs at 400 MHz and so on. I don't believe actual 800MHz or 667 MHz DDR2 RAM exists for laptops since I know my desktop won't post if I try to clock my DDR2 higher than 450MHz!
Double data rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
You said your RAM runs at 333MHz, so it is DDR2-667 already. Going to DDR2-800 won't help things at all, given that DDR2-667 vs DDR2-800 barely does anything for low-end quad cores, let a lone dual core laptop CPUs. This difference has been benchmarked, but I don't know any links off the top of my head.

Your bottleneck with WOW is more likely GPU than anything, unless you're running with something like 512MB of RAM - then you'll want MORE RAM and not faster RAM.

Also, I wouldn't trust the Windows Experience Index at all - when it says my SSD is slower than my old Samsung F1 1TB hard disk, something is wrong!