Point of diminishing returns?

[LeftyAce]

Hi all,

 

One of my sticks of DDR 500 ram just bit the dust, so I'm back running at stock speeds with a brand new set of G.Skill DDR400 sticks. I'm hesitant to overclock budget ram, and would like to know whether it's worth restoring my cpu overclock with the ram on a divider? Or is the ram going to bottleneck the whole thing anyway?

[hardnrg]

RAM speed is not that important on 939... whether the RAM is on a divider or not, just try to keep the timings as tight as possible...

 

RAM performance doesn't really contribute much to overall system performance on 939, so overclock your CPU as much as you can, and you can let the RAM settings be an afterthought of sorts

 

The 166 divider (roughly FSB/HTT 6 : RAM 5) works well for me with my Opteron 170 and 2x1GB of GSkill HZ, on water or high performance air I could run:

 

9x315 = 2835 MHz

166 divider: 2835 / 11 = 257.7 MHz

3-4-4-8-1T

 

It's PC-4000, so the stock RAM speed is 250 MHz, so it was barely overclocked

 

Now, running in a near-silent setup, I'm running:

 

9x290 = 2610 MHz

166 divider: 2610 / 11 = 237.3 MHz

3-4-3-7-1T (I think)

 

So, now, the RAM is slightly underclocked, but the timings are tightened slightly.

 

Just overclock your CPU as much as you can

[LeftyAce]

Thanks for the info! I guess I should start reading-up on timings...

[battery]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_latency