I have an (at this point) ancient Lenovo X220 laptop. I picked up 2x8GB of RAM for it, but it doesn't boot if I have both sticks in (or 8 + 4) which makes me sad and I don't understand why. It's possible I have the wrong kind of RAM. I have [DDR3-1600MHZ with 9 timings?](https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX55595), but the [x220](https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X220) only supports 1333MHz by default. I thought that faster RAM would just be wasted as it could be run slower, but I might be wrong about this. I could also buy same module with a CAS latency of 12 which might help? The other possibility is that the laptop has [coreboot](https://www.coreboot.org/) installed instead of a regular BIOS, and the version I was built in 2015. I've successfully messed with some of the coreboot stuff on this machine before, but only in the sense that I changed the grub config on the embedded filesystem. I'm walking through the [coreboot build tutorial](https://doc.coreboot.org/tutorial/part1.html) to see if I can build the latest version. I might even change the payload to SeaBIOS instead of grub, since that's a bit easier to use, but is much less cool. I did find a [reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/coreboot/comments/kiz8ua/increasing_ram_speedfrequency_x230_2133mhz/) that pointed me to [skulls](https://github.com/merge/skulls) (prebuilt coreboot but only for the x230) and [libreboot](https://libreboot.org/) (which I've run into before and will now look closer at) Libreboot's docs are so confusing and overwelming. I think I found out how to follow [ivy common to patch in some binary blobs](https://libreboot.org/docs/install/ivy_has_common.html) and the [install docs](https://libreboot.org/docs/install/) to produce a ROM, but... I'm scared to flash it. > It would run fine with just `max_mem_clock_mhz` set in devicetree.cb from [this reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/coreboot/comments/kiz8ua/increasing_ram_speedfrequency_x230_2133mhz/) sounds interesting too... A [config.txt for the x220 that is supposed to work](https://review.coreboot.org/plugins/gitiles/board-status/+/HEAD/lenovo/x220/4.12-2974-ga32df26ec0/2020-09-26T11_42_28Z/config.txt) for coreboot This tutorial on building [sandybridge](https://www.coreboot.org/Intel_Sandybridge_Build_Tutorial) There's also this [prebuilt ROM for the x220](https://github.com/m4rc0linux/x220-coreboot), I think this is what I'll flash tomorrow. Going to sleep on this though