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DRAM Drive strenth settings??

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chris64

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Joined
Dec 10, 2004
Location
earth
In my bios on my neo2 winnie setup theres a setting for :DRAM drive strenth (weak,normal). What exactly does this do? Does it help overclocking? If it does how?? Does it let me take my ram higher? Does it help me get the hypertransport thingy higher? And finally what performance loss will there be by setting it to weak?

Please a full detailed explanition if u can. I seem to only get one word responces on this setting. I really just want to know exactly what it does.

THanks guys, chris
 
As far as I understand it, it is to tell the board how strong of a signal to send. If you're using lots of memory, then it is best to set it to normal.

It's iffy to say that it will help overclocking. It may, when you have lots of ram installed.

It doesn't do anything for the HT link.

Setting it to weak may cause instability when using loads of memory.
 
512mb modules would be what I would consider to be loads, though it's not really loads anymore. In any case, I would leave it at normal.
 
ok, cause i saw on some peeps screenis that they had it set at weak in A64 tweaker.
 
I have read that weak is good for TCCD and normal for UTT (BH) type mem. I think it was a post from an OCZ rep, but I forget which. Supposedly using the appropriate setting allows the RAM to clock better. Maybe someone can ellaborate.
 
That's the first I have keard that. I had always heard to leave it at normal, but if there is some advantage to setting it at weak with tccd I would like to know as well. I'm going to scout around the forums.
Edit: Okay here's what I found.
http://forums.vr-zone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=20888&page=3
Looks like Eldonko is on to something. I will try this on my tccd and let you know how I make out.
 
Last edited:
rseven said:
That's the first I have keard that. I had always heard to leave it at normal, but if there is some advantage to setting it at weak with tccd I would like to know as well. I'm going to scout around the forums.
Edit: Okay here's what I found.
http://forums.vr-zone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=20888&page=3
Looks like Eldonko is on to something. I will try this on my tccd and let you know how I make out.
Yah, that’s where I read it, thanks for posting the source.
 
Well, I have some interesting results to report. I set my dram strength to weak and after I found out that the system I set the ram at 282mhz and ran Memtest86, test 5. On the fourth pass it finally generated 2 errors. I then ran the same test with the dram strength set at normal and got 40 errors on the second pass. I then reset the dram strength back to weak just to make sure it wasn't a fluke and this time I got 2 errors on the third pass and 3 on the fourth. Still much better than 40 on pass 2. I then backed it down to 281mhz and went into Windows and ran Pi. I knew it would fail, but it ran about 3 minutes before it did. I then tried the same thing with the dram strength set at normal and faied Pi in just over a minute. It seems to me the weak setting is better with my tccd. Now there isn't any benefit to me as I'm running up against the limits of my winnie memory controller, but to someone else there could be some real benefits to be gotten out of this new setting. If nothing else I have learned something I may be able to use in the future. Thanks for raising the issue Chris and Eldonko. I'm going to post a link to this in the AMD Motherboard section of the forum as some folks may benefit from it or know more about it.
 
I will run a test and post my results this weekend, I will have a 3700 diego prolly tomorrow. I am also limited by mem controller until then. :shrug:
 
The drive strength had a pretty large effect on how well I could overclock my RAM. It also changes the memory bandwidth. The DFI NF4 board allows you to set the range from 0 to 8. I think that I hit a sweet spot around 6.

CJ
 
the drive strenghts of 1,3,5,7 are considered "weak" on the dfi .
while the strenghts of 2,4,6,8 are considered "strong"
now for weak drive strength 7 seems to be the closest to normal with 1 being the weakest.
for strong drive strengths , 2 seems to be the closest to normal while 8 is the strongest.
TCCD loves weak drive strengths , Gskills that i have owned in the past like 7 or 5.
OCZ plat. 2nd edition TCCD loves 5 for sure.
the Twinmos UTT and Gold Vx like 8 or 6 .
Hope this clears ur confusion a bit :) .
 
|3ourne said:
the drive strenghts of 1,3,5,7 are considered "weak" on the dfi .
while the strenghts of 2,4,6,8 are considered "strong"
now for weak drive strength 7 seems to be the closest to normal with 1 being the weakest.
for strong drive strengths , 2 seems to be the closest to normal while 8 is the strongest.
TCCD loves weak drive strengths , Gskills that i have owned in the past like 7 or 5.
OCZ plat. 2nd edition TCCD loves 5 for sure.
the Twinmos UTT and Gold Vx like 8 or 6 .
Hope this clears ur confusion a bit :) .
That's very helpful. This is one setting I never fooled with, but was happily surprised when I switched my tccd to weak dram strength.
 
Got some new information today. I have been Prime testing various settings today and my system has been failing quickly. I decided to go back to a normal dram strength and, voila, it's passing Prime. I don't know whether thi is caused by Wivdows or Prime95, but I do know that my system was able to run super Pi at 9x285 but failed Prime at 9x278 in less than one hour. Now I understand that thes two tests do not equate, but you would think that there would be less discrepancy than that.
 
rseven said:
That's very helpful. This is one setting I never fooled with, but was happily surprised when I switched my tccd to weak dram strength.

Me too! I was getting almost 900 errors in memtest at my everyday settings of 250x10. After setting drive strength to level 1 (only 1-4 with my BIOS) I got 0 at 260x10 and 2 at 265x10. Although the CPU itself still fails prime at 260x10.

Eric
 
I have since discovered that I fail Prime when I use a divider but not when I run 1:1 at the same clock speed. I do change the ram timings but not they still pass memtest86 and superpi. Very stramge. More experimenting is in order.
 
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