• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

My experience with 4 x 512mB with a Winnie

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

Gabbiani

Member
Joined
Dec 8, 2004
Well I bought my A64 just a few weeks before Venice came out. :bang head Then comes BF2, mem monster. And I have always wanted more mem for WoW.

I have read lots of threads regarding value ram and 4 sticks, and wanted to share my own experiences (more to come) about how it worked out.

Sticks are 3200 Infeneon, I already had 2, and picked up 2 more real cheap so I thought I would give it a try and worse case just buy 2x1GB later.


Very little testing has been done at this point. Took me all of lunch to get them to boot. Had to start the computer with 2 sticks and manually adjust the mem timings. Would not boot with defaults loaded.

Only settings that will boot are 3,3,3,7 and 2t. The only part there that makes me sad is the 2t, I will test later to see how bad it kills my bandwith. Timing settings were the same on 2x512.

I currently have memtester running on the box @ 225mhz, because that was my previous comfort (not quite max) at 1t. Hopefully I can squeeze a few more mhz to make up for 2t. So far it is passing all the tests. (3 hours worth)

More to come as I work on it over the next few days.

Initial cliff's notes: 4 x 512 works fine on the older 939s, however tweaking is required, at least on my DFI board. At this point timings have not been changed except 2t was required to boot. So far no overclocking ability has been lost.
 
Well, did a bit more playing around last night. Took well over 3V and loose timings to get the mem stable past 230mhz. So I went back to my origional 2.9V 3,3,3,7 2t setup. Test 5 will pass as long as needed on memtester.

Using Sandra I got results I can be happy with. At 225x10 1:1 I got 5500mB/s average overall memory bandwith. Not bad considering the insane clocks (for my setup) that I needed to reach 6000 on the bandwith. The only real loss I could see on Sandra was a drop in efficiency from @ 82% to 75%. :( So I will play around a bit more and see if another timing or something might bump that back up a little bit. The loss there, I am sure comes from 1T->2T. Any ideas here? I may just have to buy a new mem eventually anyways.

My max cpu clock does not seem to be affected. I did not get a super 939, my max on reasonable (1.6V) is @ 2.4-2.5, I say the range because I know 2.4 is stable, but 2.5 is not, I have not narrowed it down more than that. More V will probably get me more, but at this point other than benchies its not worth the risk. Also I like the fact that where I am now (225x10 @ 1.45V) DFI reports 20C. Not super acurate, but good enough for me.

On a happier note, I was worried my raided raptors were not performing where they should be. HDTach showed 190MB/s max burst, with 95MB/s avg and 7ms seek time.

Gaming wise I loaded WoW long enough to check framerate. That was unaffected but I was only in the barrens. I will try to make it to lagforge tonight.

On BF2 I was very impressed. I was running pegged at 100fps 1024x768 with all medium settings except: 2x, no dynamic light/shadow. Now I have everything set to high with 4x and max light / shadow / textures. Looks much better and holds a very stable 70ish fps. The drop is of course because my video card took a hit, but now the game is playable at those settings. Before it would be fine, except I would always lag the first time I fired in a round, and aircraft/vehicles were impossible to use for transportation. Parts of the map would load while moving quickly, lag, crash (vehicle, not game) Now there are no noticble transitions once the map loads.

So far I am very happy. Sandra reports a max theoretical on my sytem to be @ 7200 MB/s mem bandwith. I have seen well over 6k with 1t and unstable clocks, I would like to be in that range and close to 90%. But at 2T, with a mem controller that is supposed to only do 4 sticks @ 166, I am happy.
 
similar results here. I sold my neo2 / winnie 3000+ to my work, and got myself a DFI + OCZ Plat rev2 1GB kit with a 3000+ Winnie.

But for my work, it had 2x512 OCZ Premier ram, and i added 2 more of the same, so 4 sticks. I figure its an old Winnie (CBBFD) on a mediocre mobo (Neo2), i know i'll have to go 2T and probably lose a ton on my overclock. not quite.

Running now at 2.4ghz, 2T, and Ram is at 219mhz (DDR438). Memtest and SuperPi stable. so much for this DDR333 myth. ;). and best of all, i'm running those 4 sticks at that stock timing, 2.5-3-3-7, and 2.8V. I didnt have to loose timings at all, except for the nasty 2T switch. My Sandra efficiency is also 75% (might have something to do with 2T ?), with a mem score of 5250mb/s. I will try to push it up to 2.5Ghz and 228mhz RAM, once i burn in the two new sticks. that was the sweet spot on 2x512 setup. CPU can go to 2.6ghz, but ram couldnt keep up with the 166 divider.
 
I guess I should be happy my generic infeneon sticks do 225 comfortably. I have left it there for the time being just because I am too lazy to mess with dividers.

Overall I must say that it seems just as peppy, but mem hogs such as BF2 are much smoother now.
 
Back