Sorry if this is generally know but I thought that it was important enough to make a post about it.
I have recently bought 2 sticks of OCZ 8000 memory and looked at the label and noted the 2.1v written on them and so applied that voltage and all was well.
and as some people don't click on links provided...
The question of memory voltage comes up a great deal, i will try to explain the best way to find the optimum voltage you need and explain why you will see 2.1V DDR2 or 1.8V DDR3 when in some cases we will advise you to test and run lower than this.
OCZ qualify memory on many boards, for the sake of this guide i will talk about 8000 Reaper X 4GB, take this though as all our memory with the references to voltage etc covering all our product.
8000 Reaper X http://www.ocztechnology.com/product...pc_4gb_edition
OCZ test and qualify the memory on many different boards, not all boards need 2.1V for the memory to work well, but some do. Because of this we have to state the highest needed voltage that was needed for the modules to work as advertised, often though this is NOT needed. So board A needed 1.85V but board X needed 2.1V, to make sure A and X work with everything in between we state the voltage for board X.
has specifications that say 2.1V operating voltage. The reason for this is as follows. Now this also covers OCZ a little as yield at any given voltage can go up and down. This means over the life of the part the quality of the IC's may get better and require less voltage to run at 1000MHZ or may get worse and require a little more voltage to run 1000MHZ.
So why do OCZ forum staff ask you set ONLY the voltage the memory needs and not just set this max voltage as stated on the website?
We do this knowing in many cases there may be no need to run the voltage that high. Many boards (high end) have awesome memory overclocking and usually operate at much higher frequencies at lower voltages...hence we advise you test and ONLY set the voltage that is needed to be stable.
So why do some boards work better than others?
Many of the top enthusiast boards overclock memory very well, the reasons for this are the PCB's and components used on the motherboard have been tuned to keep memory signaling as clean as it can be, this in turn means it is able to run at higher frequencies. This is why top flight enthusiast boards are more expensive than mid range channel boards ( which usually focus on feature set over overclockability)
These enthusiast boards also feature settings which allow much finer tuning of the memory voltages, timings and clock signals. This makes it possible to fine tune memory at higher clocks using less voltage.
I thought just adding more voltage helped memory overclock?
It does, but there are 2 ways to get the memory doing what you want.
1 Fine tune the clocks and timings using the options in bios.
2 Force more voltage to the clocks and memory and use brute force to make it work.
Now obviously option 1 is what we want end users to adopt, the reasons for this are mainly it helps to ensure a long and productive life for the memory, and it produces less heat which can actually mean it runs better.
Overall you can either just follow the specs that came on the packet or off the website and set that voltage; or you can fine tune using that voltage as a base to start and set the voltage the memory actually needs to run and no more. Be aware though many boards actually overvolt by default, if you set 2.1V in bios you may be actually supplying 2.2V or higher to the memory. Also the AUTO setting does not usually set 1.8V DDR2 or 1.5V DDR3, it normally sets quite a bit higher than this. On some boards I have seen as high as 2.0V for DDR2 and 1.78V for DDR3 all hidden behind the AUTO setting.
For me it meant that I reduced my voltage from 2.1v to 1.79v and all remains well with the memory running at 1000mhz without any errors after being tested. Hopefully the longevity might have been improved but at least there is scope to increase it if and when it is needed.
IMO it would have been better to have labelled the memory as having a range of voltages like 1.8v-2.1v. I will mention this in OCZ's forum.
I'm not sure if the above could apply to memory from other manufacturers but I think that it is something that needs to be considered before you automatically apply the voltage written on the label.
EDIT: Dyslexic fingers were up to no good with the title
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