Have you or Do you overclock your memory ? Positive results ?

Something that interests me really. As we know systems can act funny oddly with some different settings. Some may work for one which does not for another.

Basically memory overclocking , do we do it. ?

I have done both. In some situations yes i noticed a difference. But for me smoothness and consistently were more important than raw speed.

Also bearing in mind that memory tends to be the weak point in any system for stability , especially when stressing or overclocking a system and not necessarily memory either.

My latest experience is with the Corsair DDR3 DDR12800 i am using. Due to high amount of ram installed i was limited to a maximum stable overclock. This began to annoy me so in an attempt to understand this better i went on testing.
I found that i was able to run a much higher ram speed with slightly reduced CPU speed. Running the memory at speed excess of 1700mhz on stock voltages. Again in most cases to achieve good solid over-clocks you need to alter the voltage. But can we safely do so with memory ?? so people say is not always enough.
Although my system with the increased ram speed worked well on stock voltages , temps increased and when really stressing things were not within a reasonable cool temperature set by my standards. So I basically edged back to using a higher overclock on the cpu and less on the memory.

I did do another test using only 6GB memory optimum to test a high clock. Funny enough it allowed me to achieve a higher overall clock @ 4.4ghz. Though this was not stable and again temps became an issue. Resorting back to the marketed 1600mhz allowed me to achieve 4.2ghz stable clock. So this is an option for me in the future if i do need any extra power , although it be at the expense of some memory its there and stable.

So conclusion form me was not so fantastic return. ? Raised the bar some on overall overclock levels but again caused instabilities. I am currently running my 1600mhz memory @ 1400mhz using a mere 1.5v , 0.15 lower than the marketed required amount. Though 1366 users will tell you anything over PC - 1066 is overclocking anyway. So i am in-between with the DDR3 experience.

Have overclocked memory many times on prior systems with good results though i never really have a puter more than a few years so hard to comment on how long they would have continued to work optimally for.

I would like your thoughts if thats what you have , any other experiences would be interesting to hear also.

Thanks for reading.

McsylisT

I have some DDR3 sitting on my desk waiting to go into my new mobo when it arrives I will let you know when it gets here. It is going to be very happy with my new 5770 I got today.

Sounds awesome to me SMD ,

Interesting another 5770 user. ! These cards are proving very popular.

Have you a review for one of these cards mate ? Id love to see it
personally as i think its the route i will be going down.

McT

I only went with a 5850 because a friend had it sitting around from a order that never got used and I got it at an unbelievable price.

I had been looking at the 5770 but nobody had them in stock so I called my friend and by chance he had the 5850.

We have a review comming out soon for the ASUS 5770 CuCore. the 5850 is a better card Joel the price was right for mine if you know what I mean.

Yeah interesting topic this. For some reason, certain elements of computing melt my brain as it were. Printers and faxes just hate me and DRAM used to be the element of OC'ing that vexed me at the time. I did not realise that the chips were quite weak with dealing with the juice. I would say that DDR was more sensitive to volt changes than SATA. Anyway I'll keep myself on track here before I type a novel...

My first foray into Overclocking with a new overclockers mobo almost became a disaster. With the pci bus locked, I assumed that the OCZ Silver would be able to take atleast a modest OC. How I was wrong. Thankfully, I managed to step back with ease and remember that even with specialist equipment, we are talking about the Dark Arts afterall (BTW, I was 28 when I got into computing and the era regarding overclocking, is the Prescott P4 days when I started to take an interest in the Dark Arts, I'll omit the Jedi pun :D)

Anyway, my mobo was a DFI LP socket 939 mobo with the flouresent sockets and ran a Athlon 3800X2 Toledo. The OCZ did come from a workmate whom did not OC. I did suggest to myself that the sticks could have been burned, but slotted them in without another thought. That was the point that I could have borked them. Stupidly, I thought I would get away with not dropping the divider to 333 and left it on 400 (doubled rate visible in BIOS) and then went for it. I was actually looking for a modest OC of around 2.2Ghz on a X10 multi due to having a cheapo Icute case. The particular OCZ I had were supposed to be good overclockers, but yeah, I guess not that much.

Anyway, the OC took and the system appeared to be stable and I started to stress test with Orthos. Whether my enthusiam was clouding my mind (no pun intended) or I was stoned or something, the system was talking to me in that way you can't explain. I stopped immediately and dropped into BIOS and dropped the divider. Good job too because Prime 95 caused instability, if I had tried that with the previous, I would have been smoking with rage and had OCZ Black sticks.

The final OC testing resulted in a 2.65Gig and the DRAM on a 266 or 333 divider. The speed was about 198.00. I don't remember what the multi was so this is only a rough math guess. I experimented with a X8 and X10 multi (X4 and 5 in BIOS) but because I was so blase about the DRAM, I more than likely handicapped myself before I began. I showed more respect to that element from that point forward. DRAM may not have such a significant effect on overall overclocking, but you got to pick those sticks very carefully. Mmm, maybe one day I'll apply that train of thought to the OS and learn to use Windows properly or man up and run Linux