Ram help...OCing

[Lanlan]

I just built my first PC, relevant specs are as follows:
AMD A8 3870k APU
Biostar TA75A+ Mobo
Kingston Hyper-x 2GB 1866mhz RAM (x2)

The mobo says the RAM is running at 1600, I tried to manually OC it to 1866. Never OC'd before, but I just looked around the bios and found the manual overclock option. It doesn't show up as 1866 though, and APUs benefit significantly from faster ram timing, the highest they support is 1866. Any help for a noob like me?

 

[Janus67]

Have you tried enabling the xmp profile for the memory in your BIOS?

 

[Lanlan]

Like I said, I'm a noob so I have no idea what that means xD
I'm not an idiot so I can find stuff out, but there are a ton of options and I have no idea what any of the stuff means and I dunno how to find the stuff out other than ask the nice people here.

 

[Lanlan]

And I should say I manually SET the RAM to 1866, I don't think I actually OC'd it

 

[Janus67]

I would take a read through the manual. i'm not familiar with your BIOS screen options, but there should be a setting in there to be able to set a RAM profile (called an XMP profile) it auto-loads the speed, timings, and voltage for the memory. When you set it to 1866 did you also manually change the timings to what it was rated to in your BIOS? (the timings being something like 9-9-9-27 and the voltage (probably either 1.5v or 1.65v)

 

[redduc900]

XMP on that board basically means setting the MCT Timing Mode option to Auto. If you set it to Manual, you should be able to select a Memclock Value of DDR-1866. And I'm a little confused from what you mentioned in your 1st post... "I just looked around the bios and found the manual overclock option. It doesn't show up as 1866 though", compared to your 3rd post... "And I should say I manually SET the RAM to 1866, I don't think I actually OC'd it". So are you, or are you not able to select the Memclock Value of DDR-1866 option?

 

[Lanlan]

I was able to select the 1866 option, but I don't think I technically overclocked it, since it's 1866 ram. Just fixing my wording

 

[redduc900]

I'm not sure I understand what the problem is, if there is any. If you want to try running a higher than rated effective DRAM frequency, then you'll at least need to increase the HT ref. clock / CPU base clock past 200MHz.

 

[Lanlan]

The problem is that it's only running at 1600

 

[redduc900]

Set the DRAM freq. to DDR3-1866, then post a pic of CPU-Z open to the Memory tab.

 

[Lanlan]

 

[Lanlan]

By the way thanks for tolerating my noobiness, I really know next to nothing about memory

 

[trents]

Please attach a pic of CPU-z tab "SPD" so we can see what the manufacturer says is the capability of the ram is and what are the recommended timings and voltages for the various frequency levels it can be run at.

It would also help to take a digital camera pic of the memory frequency adjustment section of your bios and attach it so we can see what you see in bios.

 

[Lanlan]

Alrighty, I'll get right on that

 

[Lanlan]

there's that one

 

[Lanlan]

 

[Lanlan]

I was just playing around in the bios and I upped the base clock to 115 and I lowered the multiplier to 27, and in the memory tab on cpu-z it says my dram frequency is 918mhz. Just a little more info

 

[redduc900]

With the DRAM freq. again at DDR-1866, change CL, tRCD, tRP, tRAS, and 2TCMD to 11-11-11-32-2T w/ the DRAM voltage set to 1.50V.

 

[Lanlan]

That lowered my framerates even more :/

 

[trents]

You might find that you get your best frame rate with the ram running at 1333mhz with lower latencies. Benchmarking shows that current Intel CPUs don't benefit from ram frequencies above 1333 in most all applications. I would assume this is true for AMD CPUs more or less as well. They just don't need the extra bandwidth. Read this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4503/sandy-bridge-memory-scaling-choosing-the-best-ddr3/6