Hallelula! But a bit odd?

[normski_]

I have been blaming my 8800GTS for ten days now for being pants, kept crashing in games, rarely could I get 3dMark to run the tests fully and no way could I get it to run through 10 minutes of demo vids in 3dMark 06.

eVGA wanted me to RMA the card for them to have a look, and I thought I had tried everything, so I went back to the drawing board and set about putting everything back to default setting in the bios (not that I had oc'd anyhting anyway).

When I assembled this system and its identical twin, I upped the 1.8 stock voltage of the DS4 to 2.1v as allegedly that was what the GEIL PC6400 I had needed to run. I also set the timings to 4-4-4-12 as recommended, instead of the 5-5-5-18 that the Auto settings gave me.

So today I reset these back to 1.8v and 5-5-5-18....and kerchow. It appears that everything is sorted!! No more random crashing, especially in games, can go for stupid detail on all of them without problems.

Now here is the killer....I assumed that I would take a hit in the perfromance stakes going to the new settings, but to my surprise, my 3d Mark 06 only dropped by 60 points, and mb/s bandwidth for memory read/write/copy and latency measured in Everest and Sandra are up! It's even improved the results of the CPU tests!

Is there any rhyme or reason to this?

 

[sja360]

i believe if your memory wasnt set right and was storing incorrect values then it would affect performance scores in benchmarks if you ever did complete them.

 

[trojan698]

You should try running the memtest v1.65 (bootable cd version) on your ram at its rated timings and speed and see if it comes up with any errors, if it does I'd RMA it otherwise you're not getting the performance you paid for. This Geil ULL seems to be causing loads of problems.

 

[normski_]

Tried memtest at both settings and zero errors!

It is obviously a problem with the ram, but when I originally spoke to OC 10 days ago asking if they thought it might be the ram, I was told that memtest was what they would check it with and if no errors then that wouldn't be it. RMA'ing the ram on that basis would seem pointless then really, as I believe they would just say it is ok.

At the end of the day, I am not planning to go mad oc'ing things anyway, the scores I am getting seem pretty similar to people with the same setup using the "recommended" settings, so I can happily live with it.

My only regret is buying it in the first place, I knew it was risky with the amount of talk of the latest load of GEIL being crap, and I went for it just to save £20 over buying Corsair....you live and learn.