So, we all know, starting with Skylake in late 2015, Intel locked down its mobile platform to any form of overclocking, except for multiplier unlocked mobile chips with the HK suffix. The mainstream Haswell (4th gen) platform provided 2 extra turbo bins over the base turbo frequency but this was lost with Skylake (and Broadwell before it). Those of us who jumped on board the Mobile Skylake platform soon found out the 3.1GHz base turbo frequency of the upper tier, locked, 6700HQ was nothing to sneeze at and its 45w TDP pushed the thermal limits on many of the gaming platforms it was mostly paired with. With no way of overclocking the cpu, coupled with the thermal limitations of the mobile platform, most enthusiasts sought what little extra performance they could glean from the platform by undervolting the cpu in order to prevent thermal throttling under heavy gaming loads.
Now, overclocking typically involves cpu, gpu, and ram. On the 6th gen mobile platform, only gpu overclocking was widely attempted by enthusiasts with any amount of success. The cpu side was a dead end, since the locked chips had their multipliers fused off, and bclk multipliers were not exposed in bios.
That left RAM.
The main advantage RAM has going for it is that the platform allows RAM to be replaced. What this means is that unlike the cpu, the memory subsection of the platform must necessarily be flexible to accommodate any replacements down the line when the need arises. This flexibility works to the savvy overclocker's advantage because it means this area of the bios is not locked down on most platforms. Now, there are those who will argue that overclocking RAM is not worth it; the risk is too great and the reward too little. I agree 100%. However, because the Skylake Mobile platform officially supports a paltry DDR4 2133 MHz (and that's what mobile devices were shipped with), I find that overclocking my RAM results in a substantial boost in overall performance and responsiveness and especially in many benchmarks. Also, on a thermally constrained platform where cpu overclocking is nil, RAM speed helps to wring significant ipc overhead which would otherwise go to waste in bandwidth constrained scenarios. Finally, with hexacores and octocores being released on the mobile platforms, this post may offer an insight as to just how much bandwidth limited these platforms may be, with their DDR4 2400 MHz, and DDR4 2666 MHz RAMs respectively.
This post is not a guide, but rather to show how much the 2133 MHz RAM bottlenecks the 6th gen mobile quadcore processors, and implications for the hexacore and octocore platforms. Over the next few days I'll update this OP with stock and overclocked benchmark comparisons.
6700HQ
HWInfo showing memory overclocking is supported on this platform.
The RAM (2x8GB Hynix SoDimms)
Stock AIDA64 Cachemem Benchmark (2133 MHz)
DDR4 2667 MHz Overclock
DDR4 2800 MHz Overclock
To be continued.....
Edit: DDR4 2700 MHZ Overclock
Now, overclocking typically involves cpu, gpu, and ram. On the 6th gen mobile platform, only gpu overclocking was widely attempted by enthusiasts with any amount of success. The cpu side was a dead end, since the locked chips had their multipliers fused off, and bclk multipliers were not exposed in bios.
That left RAM.
The main advantage RAM has going for it is that the platform allows RAM to be replaced. What this means is that unlike the cpu, the memory subsection of the platform must necessarily be flexible to accommodate any replacements down the line when the need arises. This flexibility works to the savvy overclocker's advantage because it means this area of the bios is not locked down on most platforms. Now, there are those who will argue that overclocking RAM is not worth it; the risk is too great and the reward too little. I agree 100%. However, because the Skylake Mobile platform officially supports a paltry DDR4 2133 MHz (and that's what mobile devices were shipped with), I find that overclocking my RAM results in a substantial boost in overall performance and responsiveness and especially in many benchmarks. Also, on a thermally constrained platform where cpu overclocking is nil, RAM speed helps to wring significant ipc overhead which would otherwise go to waste in bandwidth constrained scenarios. Finally, with hexacores and octocores being released on the mobile platforms, this post may offer an insight as to just how much bandwidth limited these platforms may be, with their DDR4 2400 MHz, and DDR4 2666 MHz RAMs respectively.
This post is not a guide, but rather to show how much the 2133 MHz RAM bottlenecks the 6th gen mobile quadcore processors, and implications for the hexacore and octocore platforms. Over the next few days I'll update this OP with stock and overclocked benchmark comparisons.
6700HQ
HWInfo showing memory overclocking is supported on this platform.
The RAM (2x8GB Hynix SoDimms)
Stock AIDA64 Cachemem Benchmark (2133 MHz)
DDR4 2667 MHz Overclock
DDR4 2800 MHz Overclock
To be continued.....
Edit: DDR4 2700 MHZ Overclock
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