Did I double my RAM or set it correctly?

Tolley · 16 Jul 2020 at 17:01

In Task Manager > Performance > Memory my RAM Speed was showing 800Mhz. (Hyper X Fury Dual DDR3 1600 2x8GB) I now figure this meant 800Mhz (single stick) so 1600 for both? But in my BIOS I set my RAM to 1866. (don't know if that's for both, or single stick) and now my PC runs noticably better. Edit: No XMP since the RAM has it built in apparently - which is why I upped to 1866 to begin with, as a little OC but don't know if it's way too high.

ASUS® Z97-P, i5-4690k - Devil's Canyon 3.5 Ghz Base, running at 4.27 Ghz, GTX 970 - No OC.

I was having severe trouble running the new COD. This RAM change seems to have fixed all my issues, and I'm probably buying a new pc soon anyway - just wanna know if running my RAM like this is safe? I didn't change any timings, just left it all on Auto. Don't wanna fry the computer or anything, since I can probably use it as a spare - or sell for some cost, since it still runs games in medium/high at 60fps. (now also cod/warzone in medium or high without drops under 60 really, other than the plane).

Side not; not had any crashes or errors or anything in the many hours since changing.. just wanna be completely sure haha!

Brizzles · 16 Jul 2020 at 17:41

Your ram is DDR ( double Date Rate ) so 800mhz x 2 ( the double date rate ) = 1600 mhz per stick NOT 800mhz per stick.

1600mhz is the speed the stick runs at, so 1 stick would run at 1600mhz the same as 4 sticks would run at the same 1600mhz

You have now set it to 1866 mhz ( 933mhz x 2 ) so you have overclocked your original ram.

Tolley · 16 Jul 2020 at 18:12

So it was originally set to half then, so I’ve fixed it but upped it slightly?

Brizzles · 16 Jul 2020 at 21:46

Tolley said:
So it was originally set to half then, so I’ve fixed it but upped it slightly?

No, it was originally set to 1600mhz ( which is 800mhz x 2 ( double data rate ) ) the standard speed for that ram.

It was never wrong at showing 800mhz - you need to double that.

You did not double it, you increased it from 1600mhz to 1866mhz.

Tolley · 16 Jul 2020 at 23:20

Brizzles said:
No, it was originally set to 1600mhz ( which is 800mhz x 2 ( double data rate ) ) the standard speed for that ram.

It was never wrong at showing 800mhz - you need to double that.

You did not double it, you increased it from 1600mhz to 1866mhz.

ahh okay, so the rate in my bios was for both combined. But how come my memory in task manager showed 800mhz but now shows 1866mhz? Shouldn’t it have shown 933mhz?

edit; also thanks anyways! I’ve been running it all day and it’s been perfectly fine anyways and my game is even up to the 80/90 range for fps now, when before it was around 40-60 odd.

PieEater · 17 Jul 2020 at 11:31

By defualt RAM will run at the speeds defined by the CPU and / or the pre-programmed JDEC specifications which are usually well below the advertised speed of the memory itself. You must enable XMP if you want the RAM to run at the higher advertised speeds. In your original post you said that you didn't have XMP enabled, this will be why it was only running at 800Mhz (Task Manager always shows the true running speed). The fact that you saw a 100% uplift to gaming performance after enabling XMP / manually setting the speed also confirms this (you wouldn't have got anywhere near this level of increase going from 1600 to 1866).

Seearbe · 17 Jul 2020 at 17:33

I could be wrong but on first boot following install into a new system, does RAM not sometimes run at a very low speed and it takes a couple of reboots for the profiles to load properly into BIOS? I'm pretty sure that happened on my previous motherboard but that was a long time ago.

Tetras · 17 Jul 2020 at 19:52

Tolley said:
ahh okay, so the rate in my bios was for both combined. But how come my memory in task manager showed 800mhz but now shows 1866mhz? Shouldn’t it have shown 933mhz?

edit; also thanks anyways! I’ve been running it all day and it’s been perfectly fine anyways and my game is even up to the 80/90 range for fps now, when before it was around 40-60 odd.

That does seem odd, but in the last Windows update they messed around with the hardware section, even added a temperature report for the GPU, so it's possible you got caught up in that? I'd be surprised if it was really running at only 800 because even though DDR3 supports this speed, the default for most DDR3 motherboards and memory is 1333.

If it really was running at only 800 then it could explain the poor performance.

An overclock of 1866 from 1600 is very feasible, but I'd recommend you set your memory to 1600 if you're not going to bench test it. Unless you only have games on this system, in which case game stable sounds fine.

Tolley · 18 Jul 2020 at 17:04

Tetras said:
That does seem odd, but in the last Windows update they messed around with the hardware section, even added a temperature report for the GPU, so it's possible you got caught up in that? I'd be surprised if it was really running at only 800 because even though DDR3 supports this speed, the default for most DDR3 motherboards and memory is 1333.

If it really was running at only 800 then it could explain the poor performance.

An overclock of 1866 from 1600 is very feasible, but I'd recommend you set your memory to 1600 if you're not going to bench test it. Unless you only have games on this system, in which case game stable sounds fine.

yeah my games required a lot of faffing around to run nicely and now it seems to be pretty good. I don’t do anything else on it other than game and watch stuff anyway. Had no issues still and it’s been a few days. And possible that an update or something messed it up, or it could’ve been set incorrectly from the get-go, I’ve literally never tried it before. I just wanted to play Warzone with it not looking terrible so I was looking up all different ways and came across a similar post about RAM and that’s when I checked mine. It definitely said 800mhz in performance & bios and now says 1866mhz in both.