Noob question to overclocking RAM

Notorious Lee

Notorious Lee

Notorious Lee

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Joined
1 Jan 2007
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355
Hi guys,

I have a few questions but first let me give you a very brief background.

For a while I have been running 2 x 1GB sticks of Corsair PC-6400 RAM with timing's of 4-4-4-12 & voltage of 2.1v.

Now, I have purchased 2 x 2GB sticks of the same memory with same timings & installed them of which Vista is now showing I am using 6GB of RAM in dual channel mode.

Pretty straight forward.

Now originally my RAM was letting my Vista score down as all my components are getting a 5.9 score but my RAM was getting 5.0 of which I pretty much know the bottleneck lies at the RAM because I am only using 800MHz sticks & my processor bus speed is 1066MHz.

However, since I installed the extra 4GB my RAM is now scoring 5.3 (slight improvement).

The reason I puchased the PC-6400 RAM is due to me reading posts on here with a lot of people stating it's a waste of money paying the extra for PC-8500 RAM because PC-6400 can be overclocked which leads me onto my question.

I am a complete beginner when it comes to overclocking but I want to squeeze a little extra out of my RAM bearing in mind I just have air cooling so can someone please offer any advice as to how I would go about this for example do I just increase the memory speed in BIOS or do I have to up the voltage as well, etc?

Thanks in advance.
 
Tbh you'll gain next to nothing from trying to clock your memory whilst your CPU's FSB is still at 266/1066mhz.

Anything over 1:1 results in small gains, and you're currently running a 2:3 ratio as it is.
 
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But surely if I increase my RAM speed bandwidth from 800MHz & lets say for arguments sake to as close as 1066MHz then that will reduce the bottleneck improving peformance.

I agree it may only slightly improve but I would to get the most out of it.

Also, when your talking about ratio what do you mean.

Sorry if it's a dumb question.
 
Forget about the 1066mhz rating. It's really only running at 266mhz, and thus the memory is currently much faster than it.

By ratios I mean the FSB to memory speed ratio ie - at 1:1 they are both the same speed (regard 800mhz as 400mhz because it's Double Data Rate memory). You're on the 2:3 ratio ie - your FSB is 266mhz and your memory is at 400mhz. (266 / 2) x 3 = 400mhz (or 800mhz because it's Double Data Rate memory).
 
So on that note Cob, with my fsb running at 425 @ 3.4 Ghz and 450 @ 3.6Ghz and my memory running at 5:6 at 1020 at 5-5-5-12, would I be better at running the memory at 1:1 and hence 850 or 900 which means I could run it at 4-4-4-12?

Oh and to the op, get that QX6700 overclocked. It should run fine without any extra voltage by just changing the fsb from 266 to 333 which will mean you cpu will run at 3.16Ghz although it may a little bit extra voltage on the core or change the multiplier to 9 and run it at 9x333 = 3Ghz which probably won't need any extra voltage at all.

You might even want to try 8 x 375 which will mean your memory will run at 750 on 1:1 or 900 at 5:6 ratio.
 
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Greebo said:
So on that note Cob, with my fsb running at 425 @ 3.4 Ghz and 450 @ 3.6Ghz and my memory running at 5:6 at 1020 at 5-5-5-12, would I be better at running the memory at 1:1 and hence 850 or 900 which means I could run it at 4-4-4-12?
Click to expand...

You'd have to benchmark both settings to see which was the fastest.

But there'll be very little difference between them in real-world usage.
 
Hi Cob,

If this is the case then why is Vista only scoring my memory @ 5.3 even though I have increased the amount of memory by 4GB?

Also, what software would you recommend for testing memory & other components bearing in mind I am using Vista 64 bit?

I also want to test for temps.
 
prime95 blend stresses memory and fsb for stability.

I run superpi to give a quick result between different memory settings for a quick speed test or sisandra for bandwidth and latency tests for full details but takes longer.

My 4Gb of memory running at 1066 5-5-5-12 gets 5.9 in vista but that is with the fsb running at 450 as well
 
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