What's more stable 2000 mhz or 1600 mhz ram?

What's more stable 2000 mhz or 1600 mhz ram?

I'm building a 3d render workstation for a friend. It's a water-cooled i7 930 poot with a Quadro card. Now I know proper workstations use mobos with two xeon cpus and registered ram. But this is what he wanted. I plan to OC the bugger a bit but don't intend to sacrifice stability for speed. So naturally I'll divide the ram to get it as close as poss to a 1:1 ratio with the fsb and lower the cas latency (I won't push that too hard as to risk too much instability) before raising the fsb (again, not going overboard). The mobo is a Asus P6T.

However, I am unsure as to which ram would be best for the job though I suspect 2000 mhz is the one to go for.

Any thoughts and expertise would be most welcome. Thanks.

1333 is the most stable as it is the only speed actually recognized by Intel and AMD. After that would be 1600.

Ocing and workstation type stability do not go together.
That said, what xoke said is totally accurate.
I think i'd go for 1333-7-7-7 (or lower timings) or 1600-8-8-8 (or lower timings).

Well in regards to your question about "what's more stable" makes no sense, since either DDR3-1600 or DDR3-2000 can be set up to run just as stable on the P6T as lower frequency DDR3-1333.

So naturally I'll divide the ram to get it as close as poss to a 1:1 ratio with the fsb and lower the cas latency (I won't push that too hard as to risk too much instability) before raising the fsb

Click to expand...

And this statement really makes no sense either, since Core i7 architecture has a base clock / main reference clock (BCLK; default is 133MHz) from which all other clocks are derived, unlike earlier FSB-based Intel chips. Increasing this one setting will also overclock the RAM as well as the Uncore (i.e. the L3 cache, memory controller, and Quick Path Interconnect / QPI). So for instance in order to run DDR3-1600 at it's rated frequency w/ a default BCLK of 133MHz, the DRAM frequency multiplier would need to be bumped to x12 = DDR3-1600 (800MHz).

I admit to being unfamiliar with OCing an i7. I had hoped it was similar to Ocing a Quad core. (Edit: I do know there's more to it and do have some info on the process.)

Are you suggesting to NOT OCing the setup at all and get the slowest ram ~ as any OCing, no matter how small, will make the system too unstable for sustained 3d rendering?

Perhaps I should underclock it then?

[Just to clarify, I was referring to the FSB : DRAM ratio as displayed by CPUZ under the "Memory" tab.]

There's no need in overclocking the CPU in order to run the RAM at it's rated DDR3-1600, just set the DRAM Frequency option to DDR3-1600 which equates to a 2:12 FSB : DRAM ratio. If you decide on DDR3-2000 the BCLK will need to be upped to 166 (166 x 12 = 2000; 1000MHz DRAM freq.). In order to keep the clock speed at the default of 2.8GHz, you would need to lower the multiplier from x21 to x17 (166 x 17 = 2.82GHz).