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New Memory = headache

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hydrata

Member
Joined
Jul 26, 2001
Location
Birmingham, AL
I just picked up a gig of corsair value select ram here from newegg and proceeded to install it.

I previously had 256 megs of mushkin pc2700 (my system's ancient). well, i know overclocking can be more troublesome w/ 2 memory slots filled versus one. so, since i moved from the 1*256mb to the 2*512mb i had to cut back about 3mhz on my fsb. so i was a bit upset about this, but it was somewhat expected. however, i'm having trouble pushing my memory timings. i figured since i'm running this memory 30mhz slower than what it's capable of i should be able to push it at cas2 instead of 2.5, and push up the other timings as well. however, the computer doesn't seem to like this and i can't get it to run at anything besides default settings. i hope i'm not doing something stupid like setting the timings to user defined but leaving the voltage at auto, which is creating conflicts.?????? i'm too tired to mess w/ it anymore right now.

if i only run w/ one stick of the 512 i can get a faster fsb. what do you guys think would be better? a faster fsb and only 512 of ram or a slower fsb and 1gb of ram? i don't do anything extremely memory intensive, gaming is the most intensive task i do. or is there any suggestions you guys have to help me tweak my memory and my system? i've tried switching the slots, but that doesn't seem to make much of a difference.
 
First off, what FSB? Second have you confirmed what speeds it *will* do in memtest86? Not all RAM is the same you gotta clock it to what it is capable of. Cant beat a dead horse
 
I had the VS series and the absolute most i could boot with was 218MHz. They are value for a reason, WIth that processor, you probably need to run them as DDR333
 
While it's a subject of some disagreement here in the forum, I have always found that ram performs better after a good period of burn-in. I would be running memtest every night, all night for the next week or two to speed that process. This may help the timings, whether you can make it to cl2 probably depends on how much you underclock it. I can run Kingston value ram pc2700 at cl2 when it's running at pc2100 speeds. I was unable to do that till after it burned-in.
 
I was at about 173-175 on my FSB before i switched to the gig of ram. I figured this ram would be able to handle better timings since it's pc3200 and my previous ram was only pc2700....i mean, techinically i'm underclocking the pc3200 since i'm running my fsb at 170 now. i figured since the ram was underclocked i could then push the other timings. i'm not familiar w/ memtest86, as i've been out of the overclocking seen for a while, do you have a link to it? and also, could my previous attempts adjusting the timings on the new RAM have gone wrong because i switched the timings from SPD to user, but forgot to switch the voltage off of auto-defined to user-defined??
 
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