Help Me Overclock My Ram

[bkh2]

Hey HWC, I have no experience overclocking RAM, so if I could get your help, that would be awesome. With regards to my current settings, I read somewhere that the frequency of my RAM is the DRAM frequency times two. Since I have DDR3 ram rated at 1600 Mhz, this is seriously running under spec right? Here's an even more noob question: what do all of those numbers mean? I don't need a very specific explanation, but the general gist would be appreciated. Thanks.

[bkh2]

Finally had some time to try overclocking my ram. Instead of 543 MHz for my DRAM, it's now up to 724 MHz. The only thing I had to bump was the QPI voltage; my CPU voltage stayed at 1.1875V and I bumped my QPI voltage from 1.25V to 1.2625V. However, my timings have gone from 6-7-7-16 to 9-9-9-24. Is this bad?

I've also tried to bump it up to 1800 MHz (in the BIOS, it said something like 1814 MHz). However, I haven't had much success. I've tried up to these settings and the farthest I've gotten was almost to the login screen; I see the mouse cursor with the blue circle busy symbol thing, and then it BSoD's on me. I don't know how much higher I can go because the colour of the settings change when I increase the value. I don't know if this is the same for all motherboards, but when I'm in the "safe" voltage range, the text is blue, but when I turn it up higher, it changes to yellow, and it goes to purple when I have, for example, the CPU voltage up at 1.3V.

Frequencies:

BCLK: 181
PCIE: 100
DRAM: 1814
UCLK: auto
QPI: auto

Voltages:

CPU: 1.2625V
PLL: auto
QPI: 1.3V
IOH, IOH PCIE, ICH, ICH PCIE (what are these?): all auto
DRAM: 1.64V

My goal is to maintain the 3.8 ghz OC while having the RAM at 1800mhz

[Babrbarossa]

Yes- Higher latency/timings (9-9-9-24) translate to slower RAM - what is happening is that your memory is set to auto so that as the frequency increases, the timings are automatically loosened to ensure that the memory is still stable at that higher frequency- you can set it to manual and try lowering those timings one at a time until you lose stability.

[bkh2]

Unfortunately, I can't get a stable 1800 mhz frequency, even at those looser timings. Are all my voltages within acceptable ranges? I understand everyone's definition of "safe" voltages are different, but they aren't outrageously high, right? Does anyone have stable settings that they can share with me, just so I can get an example of stable frequencies at their respective voltage settings?

[Babrbarossa]

Those voltages are fine. I wouldn't go much higher on the ram for 24/7, but there is still some headroom in the CPU and QPI depending on how good your cooling is if you are looking to get more out of your CPU.

[bkh2]

Thanks for your help, Babrbarossa. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with 3.8Ghz, but my ram was seriously lacking so I decided to try and make it better.

Would you suggest going for tighter timings or higher frequency? Right now, I'm sitting around 1400 MHz for Ram frequencies at 9-9-9-24. Should I try and reduce these timings or keep them the same and try for 1800MHz?

[Babrbarossa]

Try both ways- there often isn't a lot of overhead in DDR3 kits (especially when dealing with 3X2 GB) so you might not get much extra out of them though. I've handled a couple of DDR3 kits that didn't even perform to spec- seems to be some tight binning going on - I have a set of GSkill Tridents that are a fast set of RAM, but I wasn't able to squeeze barely anything extra out of them.

[myleftnut]

Definitely try both ways. If your ram can do tighter timings on lower speeds you can try running it around 1300mhz with like 6-6-6 or 7-7-7's at 1.65v and it would basically have the same performance and higher ram speeds with looser timings in most things. There's more than enough bandwidth so you can get away with using tighter timings.