#1 ·
I picked up some Kingston DDR3 1600 MHz RAM for my laptop from Amazon—8 GB total, and if it matters, I believe it runs at 1.35V. My old memory is a Samsung 4 GB stick, 10600, DDR3, which I think is rated at 1.5V.
Looking closely at the specs, it seems my laptop doesn't actually support more than 4GB per slot, so I suspect any tinkering with voltage combinations or different pairings might just be a waste of time—is that right? I did try popping this new RAM in alongside my existing stick, and while the BIOS recognizes 12 GB—and Windows shows 12 GB as well—the machine has gone absolutely haywire. The laptop is lagging terribly, the fans are spinning like crazy, and occasionally the CPU just spikes to maximum capacity. Essentially, it’s totally unstable and practically unusable; even when the CPU is idling and RAM usage is sitting at a mere 20%, those fans are screaming and the whole thing starts overheating.
Is there any actual workaround here, or is this 8 GB stick just a lost cause for this hardware? If anyone can use it, I'm happy to part with it for $83 just to avoid the headache of dealing with a return, and I'll just pick up another 4GB module instead.
Looking closely at the specs, it seems my laptop doesn't actually support more than 4GB per slot, so I suspect any tinkering with voltage combinations or different pairings might just be a waste of time—is that right? I did try popping this new RAM in alongside my existing stick, and while the BIOS recognizes 12 GB—and Windows shows 12 GB as well—the machine has gone absolutely haywire. The laptop is lagging terribly, the fans are spinning like crazy, and occasionally the CPU just spikes to maximum capacity. Essentially, it’s totally unstable and practically unusable; even when the CPU is idling and RAM usage is sitting at a mere 20%, those fans are screaming and the whole thing starts overheating.
Is there any actual workaround here, or is this 8 GB stick just a lost cause for this hardware? If anyone can use it, I'm happy to part with it for $83 just to avoid the headache of dealing with a return, and I'll just pick up another 4GB module instead.