Is 2.8v detrimental to the life of the ram?

Just wondering. The latencies I have on my ram aren't too bad for Kingston value ram but I wouldn't mind more. I'm kind of afraid to give it too much voltage which could reduce the life of it. Also I can't seem to get past 190 mhz. I could increase the ram latency and it still wouldn't matter. The ony thing I have left to increase the performance of is the ram and still got another volt to go I'm wondering if I up it one volt if I should just try raising my fsb instead of increasing my ram latency.

I don't remember exactly where, but I saw on the Corsair website a while back that they do not reccomend you run your memory over 2.8V.

If a memory manufacturer says this, it says 2 things:

1. 2.8V is perfectly safe for your ram. If a company says you can run it at over default, that company must be pretty confident that it won't cause problems. If it does cause problems, that's grounds for a lawsuit or at least tons of RMA's.

2. You can probably get away with a little more, since the company wants some leeway. (Especially since motherboards can be off by almost .1V.) But, they're probably seeing problems not too far above that... like 2.9V.


Therefore, reason says that 2.8V is perfectly safe. But much more isn't.

more voltage means more heat. Heat is the enemy of electronics, and higher voltage is the enemy of silicon. Yes it will reduce the life of your memory stick and potentially reduce it stability. That is if the extra juice adds more heat that reduces the stability in greater proportion than adding more voltage adds in increased stability...

The real question is how much less life will the stick have? Dunno, and do you really care if the life is reduced? If it lasts 1 year instead of 3 years do you care?

Both of the posts above mine have good information.

Here is my take:
cooling helps extend the life of components as well as improving reliability.

If a component is designed to run at 2.7v but the manufacturer says it is ok at 2.8v then any reduction in useful lifetime is probably minimal.
If you point a fan at the ram to ensure good airflow it will help to ensure a long useful life as well.

I ran a stick of pc2100 at 3.5 volts for 6 months or so at 175/180 mhz fsb Never had a problem at those settings.

I did kill that stick (RIP- Super Ram ) when I went from 2.8 to 3.0 volts with no fan.

I don't worry about 2.8v with ram

I think a very large portion of us here run our ram at 2.8V.

Well, that's good to hear. But after those posts I upped it one more notch to the max and couldn't get any lower latency. Can't get any more fsb either. Even when I increase the latency I can't get a much higher fsb. Even though my ram can hold a good latency for it's price, I assume it's still the ram that's holding my system up. But overall, I'm satisfied with my oc. I was just going for a decent oc anyways when I built this PC. But you can't help catch the oc bug and just want more.

Actually, a lot of bartons won't do 200fsb at any multiplier. And that A7N8X often has problems reaching 200fsb.

Caffinehog said:

I don't remember exactly where, but I saw on the Corsair website a while back that they do not reccomend you run your memory over 2.8V.

Click to expand...

corsair doesn't say that it's bad to run 2.8v, thats why i run it 2.8v 24/7, no problems so far.

crap... i cant find the thread in corsair's forum that had ram guy (corsair rep) saying directly that it was save to go to 2.8v

Well ive had my ram at 2.85 volts for weeks now and still barely gets warm at full load. I have no active cooling on it nor any type of heatspreader. I've read that you need to worry once you start pushing 3.1 volts or more .......