Notebook memory settings confusion

[taq8ojh]

My father has this HP Pavilion dv7-6b90ec notebook which I am messing around with from time to time.

Since it's (despite being installed by myself and not bloated to hell by factory image) somewhat unresponsive and slow as hell, I was thinking to swap the memory for something faster and perhaps help the matter a tiny little bit, but to my surprise I just found out it already has DDR3-1600MHz modules in it.
Can anyone explain why the heck is it running at 1333MHz? Something tells me it has something to do with how the crap notebook BIOSes work and have all the values "hardcoded".

 

[Enigmoid]

http://ark.intel.com/products/53469

The i7-2670qm only supports up to 1333 mhz RAM.

Besides RAM speed won't make a difference for anything non igp related (and you have a discrete 6770m) aside from winrar and perhaps cryptography.

To improve responsiveness remove bloat and install an SSD.

 

[taq8ojh]

I found something along those lines on Wikipedia, but doesn't 3770K for example only support 1600MHz as well - and yet, people are happily running 2400MHz modules?

Yea, SSD is nobrainer, but takes some more cash to get there, which is not available yet

 

[Enigmoid]

I found something along those lines on Wikipedia, but doesn't 3770K for example only support 1600MHz as well - and yet, people are happily running 2400MHz modules?

Yea, SSD is nobrainer, but takes some more cash to get there, which is not available yet

Bios then doesn't support overclocked RAM.

RAM will not make your computer ANY snappier.

 

[sheh]

3770K for example only support 1600MHz as well - and yet, people are happily running 2400MHz modules?

Desktop mobos have far more clock, voltage, and timing settings. Heat and power are much less a concern, too.

But yeah, memory overclocking isn't what's going to make the computer faster for general use. There must be plenty of junk installed, this computer shouldn't be slow. Unless something is broken.

 

[taq8ojh]

The most broken thing is the presence of a HDD, and one with 5400rpm only on top of that.

But despite NO bloat installed whatsoever it still feels somewhat slow even with i7 onboard, even when there's little to no disk activity. But then again, I haven't seen a notebook that didn't behave at least a little bit like that.
Swapping memory just looked like the most simple thing I could do, even if it wasn't supposed to help much (and yes the integrated graphics is being used fairly often).