Max "safe" voltage for DDR3?

Well my Christmas break is coming up (exams next week ) and I figured I'd take some time off to take advantage of the freezing cold air in MI and see if I could get some air benchies to join the team.

Thing is, I've had a weird issue with my motherboard where I can't get the DRAM Multiplier to drop below x8. Since I have 1333Mhz RAM, it's already running at 180x8 = 1440 MHz for my daily OC and is only stable with really slow timings and a healthy voltage increase.

If I want to push my CPU for the benchmarks, I'll have to push my RAM as well. Knowing that DRAM voltage must stay within 0.5V of VTT, is there a max "safe" voltage for DRAM knowing they'll be in near zero ambient? Or should I just plunk down and get a faster set?

I myself would want to know why you can't drop the multiplier to get to lower speeds.

Going to a faster set of sticks is always nice, but to be so limited at this point would worry me.

Have you looked into why you can't drop the multiplier at all?

EDIT: I suppose it's possible that EVGA thought (assuming your sig board is the one you're referring to) that nobody would be using lower than 1600 rated RAM... Just seems a bit odd.

Yup, it's the blue rig in my sig. Even though RAM speed is dropping, it won't even successfully post. It'll fail post, then go through it's OC recovery which posts at default settings then sends me straight into the BIOS with my OC settings reloaded to previous settings.

I've tried going a bit faster on my memory, but it's hard to keep stable, and I'll crash every few hours while gaming. Prime95 blend'll fail on rounding errors too if I try to go faster.

Might try updating the BIOS and seeing if that fixes things. I can probably research stuff up when I take a break from studying but any action'll have to wait until next weekend. .

All depends on the ICs.
As an example, first generation Hyper ICs die over 1.7v without serious cooling, while D9GTRs are rated for 1.9v and really rather enjoy 2v-2.4v.

Generally speaking, as long as the ram doesn't get hot you're good for at least 1.65-1.7v. Be sure to keep vtt within 0.5v of course.
This is a general rule, I'm sure there are kits out there that will die on 1.7v.

I have a strange incident. I used to use 2 sticks (2x4GB) of ordinary ADATA DDR3 1333 ram. When I upgraded my mobo to MSI I used its OC Genie to OC my rig. OC Genie would set the DRAM Voltage to 1.804V and it would be fine. I then upgraded RAM to Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600. When I turned on OC Genie it would again set the DRAM Voltage to 1.804V. I think 1.804V is crazy but it seems to be okay, or at least OC Genie (MSI) seems to think so. Now that I'm trying to manually OC my rig I have set DRAM Voltage to 1.65V.

The Rampage 2 Extreme does that at high ram speeds, likely because at the time it was made the best ddr3 was rated at 1.8-1.9v, and preferred >2v.
Those days are rather long ago though, I would drop that ram voltage down personally.