Is this my bottleneck?

I recently completed my water cooling project on my cpu, gpu, and nb to get rid of thermal concerns for overclocking. now its just sheer stability.

prior to water cooling, i couldn't get my 2.8c above a FSB (1:1) of 223. Same thing when i finished installing the water. this led me to believe my RAM was slowing me down. So, i went to a 5:4 and climbed up to a stable 236 FSB.

Right now i am playing with my dimm voltage trying to see if that is the reason my RAM doesn't like going to fast. But, i am not very familiar with RAM timings and can not tell if my timings are to tight for the RAM speeds i want to run.

i have a matched pair of kingston hyper-x pc3200 (1GB). the reference timings i see on the websites say 2-3-2-6-1. but my mobo will only boot to 2.5-4-4-8, not any lower (not sure why one set has 5 #'s and the other has 4). I did get this RAM almost a year ago, so this might be why the new ones advertised are tighter.

I am just wondering if i should loosen those timings, and to what they should be set to. and if i should go higher than the default voltage of 2.6v (mobo has options of 2.65, 2.75, and 2.85)

thanks for the help

Other info: 2.8c, asus p4c800 deluxe

I suggest upping the voltage to 2.7 and see if you can get better timings.

even 2.8 is safe generally, as long as you have heatspreaders on your ram


if you dont, and dont wanna replace your ram, they are cheap at compusa.