Possible to replace RAM?

[Chris G]

Hi you can’t replace it, have a look in bios settings and see if it can be set to 1600Mhz. But be careful touching anything else as you can brick it.

Chris | Admin
Please support us and help keep TechTablets online. Affiliate revenue is used to pay for the server, studio apartment (Techtablets HQ) and buy new tech to review. Without it, this site would be dead.
Next up for review:
Ordered and waiting for my: BMAX S15 & Teclast F6 Plus
Currently testing: LG G8X & Redmi K30

[Hans Sprungfeld]

You didn’t get it. The tablet freezes and is unstable if I set it at 1600MHz with a high probability. But even at 1066MHz the same memory corruption bluescreens freezes or reboots happen at least every 2-3 days but with way less probability. My bed is they bought cheap old ram for this version, which is a disgusting and scam.

[Hans Sprungfeld]

So is the RAM soldered on the mainboard, no slot? Are you sure about that?

[Andrew]

Maybe try setting it to 800 MHz, which is what mine was clocked at out of the box. You are probably right that the RAM is cheap and they have to underclock it for stability.

[J]

its almost certainly soldered on

sure its possible to replace, but it’ll be extremely difficult to resolder new SMT ram chips

[zozzo]

Did you try enabling Memory dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) in BIOS? I have started to play with memory settings on my Chuwi Hibook because the 1066 mhz setting is clearly a bottleneck in some apps in windows like Chrome. First I set frequency to 1600 mhz. Looked stable when in heavy use, but the tablet froze/rebooted when coming out of a 20 minutes long sleep period even on charger. When the charger wasn’t plugged it froze after 2-3 minutes, and I thought it was bricked because it didn’t react at all. Fortunately after few minutes of sweating it finally rebooted with default bios settings.

Now I am trying this DVFS setting which in theory should only enable 1600 mhz mode under load. It is too early to make a judgement, but it survived 3*30 minutes of sleeping. However this was with the charger plugged, this evening I will try it on battery, if I have the nerves:)

 

Chrome scrolls much smoother with the 1600 mhz setting so it would be cool if it was stable. (geekbench memory scores are much more respectible too)

[Hans Sprungfeld]

Yepp, totally the same behavior on mine. It is really slow with the 1066MHz setting, so I tried to set RAM to 1600MHz, and then it shows the same issues you talked about. It was totally stable in usage and powered on, but when going into standby, there was a high probability that it froze or rebooted, both in Android and Windows.

I always was wondering why there are two settings for RAM frequency in that bios, A and B. So I guess this setting, DVFS means maybe it will switch back to 1066 (B) if tablet goes into standby, could that be?

I was afraid too much to play with bios settings, because on another thread people reported that a lot of these settings will lead to a bricked device. I don’t think the bios will also load to default settings, you were really lucky I guess. Sadly there is no way to reset the bios via button combo, otherwise I would play around bios settings all day. I think there are a lot of other settings still in there, which could give advantage, for example some eMMC tweaks.

I will report back how it goes with DVFS on. Sounds really promising though. I wonder though if it’s working, because, I don’t know of any other bios or device which allows to dynamically change the voltage and frequency of the RAM. I think RAM doesn’t like it very much to dynamically change those two 🙂 I also think to that to work, the mainboard needs some fast/reliable voltage phases, not sure if those tablets have them.

Thanks for the hint, will report back after 2-3 days letting tablet idle in standby.

[zozzo]

Yes, Frequency B should be the minimum frequency when DVFS is activated. I also wonder whether it is working, according to task manager freq is always at 1600 mhz even with very low 2-3% cpu usage.

RAM DVFS is a feature of cherry trail for sure, look at page 17:

http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc27/HC27.25-Tuesday-Epub/HC27.25.70-Processors-Epub/HC27.25.740-Atom-CherryTrail-Tu-Intel.pdf

[Hans Sprungfeld]

The problem is, that Cube used normal DDR3 in rev2 of the iwork10, not DDR3L. Does yours have DDR3L? I could imagine, that normal DDR3 doesn’t support dynamic change just DDR3L, because DDR3L for example allows different voltage states too, normal DDR3 not.

[zozzo]

DDR3 at 1.5V. According to AIDA frequency is constantly at 1600 mhz, so DVFS probably doesn’t work, and probably I will get a freeze soon.

 

edit: it survived 25 minutes of sleep on battery so there is still hope:)

[Hans Sprungfeld]

Mine didn’t freeze too so far, but could be luck. I actually thought mine was stable too when I tried 1600 and slow timings, but then after 4 hours sleep it suddenly rebooted. My hope is that DVFS maybe still works with the B frequency kicking in just when the tablet sleeps, and that this may keep it stable.

[Hans Sprungfeld]

I let it sleep over night on Android, when I turned in on a moment ago it was still working, no reboot over night. Looks really promising! But battery drain seems a bit more now, can be coincidence maybe.

[zozzo]

Yep mine survived the night too in windows. Battery drain looked worse, 4 hours screen on time and only 35 percent left with battery voltage at 3.69V. Next I will test battery in android which I used more in the past so I can compare better to previous experience.

[J]

Any noticeable or bench markable performance improvements?

[Hans Sprungfeld]

J wrote:

Any noticeable or bench markable performance improvements?

lol 🙂

[Author]

Posts