sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

["anestis.iliadis" <latebeat@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey guys,
I have a vpc-z12 which has 8gigs of ram. As you all know when it first came
out 4 gigs was the maximum for single dd3 so-dimm. Now that 2x8gb ddr3
so-dimm kits are so cheap (around $50), I thought I'd try to upgrade.


Initially I tried a 16 gig kit from g.skill (ddr3 1333, 1.5v) and the
laptop powered up fine, went into linux all good. System sees 16384MB of
RAM, I thought great, it works! However the system was really unstable,
powering of or rebooting whenever I was stressing the RAM.
Running memtest86 would poweroff the Z almost instantly. I returned the
memory and ordered a different one from crucial with a lower voltage
(1.35V), but I'm having the same issue. Memtest86 powers off the laptop
instantly, however linux boots fine but it's really unstable. Whenever I
run virtualbox with vms with lots of ram, I'm kicked back to the login
manager. Also stress (http://linux.die.net/man/1/stress) causes the kernel
to panick. However, other than that the system seems to be running ok.

I should mention that I have the insyde bios, I do not have the stock bios.
I dunno if it makes a difference. In the bios I can see only 6384MBs of
RAM. I don't think they provisioned a 5 digit number so the 1 from 16384 is
concatenated.
In the bios I've tried setting the ram speed to 1066, 1333, as well as 800
without any luck.

So, I would like to ask for any feedback from any of you that have been
successful. I would like to hear any success stories or any confirmation
that it definitely doesn't support more than 8 gigs.

thanks,
anestis