Quick question about adding RAM. Just about to order.

mattius1989 · 13 Oct 2011 at 16:55

Ok so I have this RAM and I am about to buy the same again. Leaving me with 8GB of RAM. Will I have to reset the overclock of my cpu or anything? Is this worth doing for the £30 it will cost me? Thanks.

Plec · 13 Oct 2011 at 17:40

YOu should be able to slot it straight in without any problems - you may have to set the memory settings up again - frequency, timings etc - but your clock should be unaffected.

If you're worried save your clock settings in a profile within the BIOS.

Whether it's worth doing depends on your finances and what you use your system for. If it's for general apps use and gaming then you're unlikely to see any benefits. But if you have the cash it's arguably worth the investment as it's cheap and rumoured to be going up in price soon.

mattius1989 · 14 Oct 2011 at 08:38

Ok, Thanks for your help. I just ordered them in the end. Money burns holes in my pockets. I bought this exact same set a year ago with my new build for double the price from here

technology.

eddiew · 14 Oct 2011 at 08:52

Just as a note, you may find that running 4 channels of memory will slightly reduce the overclock you can get. More voltages to the CPU-NB might help you out with that if it happens, though

mattius1989 · 14 Oct 2011 at 09:27

At the moment I have increased the FSB to 255 and set the NB to 2500 and put the RAM down to 1333. This gives me a stable 3.5 OC. I haven't touched any voltages or anything. I have done an OCCT test and it never goes above 45. I don't plan on overclocking any further, so do you think I will be affected? Thanks.

Plec · 14 Oct 2011 at 09:40

mattius1989 said:
At the moment I have increased the FSB to 255 and set the NB to 2500 and put the RAM down to 1333. This gives me a stable 3.5 OC. I haven't touched any voltages or anything. I have done an OCCT test and it never goes above 45. I don't plan on overclocking any further, so do you think I will be affected? Thanks.

There's always a possibilty that occupying all 4 DIMM slots will effect an existing clock due to the extra stress on the memory controller - there aren't any guarantees (not so much with modern intel setups now).

But there are tweaks you can introduce if you do run into issues - and if they don't help you may have to reduce your clock by ~200MHz but you wouldn't notice any performance decrease in everday usage. But at 3.5GHz you hopefully shouldn't have any issues.

mattius1989 · 14 Oct 2011 at 09:46

Ok, thanks for the heads up. How would this problem present itself? Temps? Stability?

Thanks.

Plec · 14 Oct 2011 at 09:50

Any number of ways - the clock may fail as soon as the memory is installed and reboot until the BIOS resets itself.

Or you could have the odd BSOD, freezing - your basic instability issues (it shouldn't effect our temps unless these are an issue already).

But hopefully you wont have any problems - i would install the extra memory and then go straight to the BIOS on first boot and check all the memory settings are correct - save and exit and cross fingers