• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

RAM OC performace boost

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

alexsama

New Member
Joined
Mar 31, 2014
Hi all, I have a question regarding this strange behaviour.
Since I will buy in the near future a new gpu I decided to try to OC my CPU to 3.6Ghz.

My curent setup is:
CPU: I5 750 2.66
GPU: gtx 460 hawk msi
ram: 8gb, 2x Corsair 4GB DDR3 1333MHz CL9 XMS3, 1x KingMax 4GB DDR3 1333MHz
psu: antec basiqpower 550W

Stock freq is 2.66 while in game it turbo boosts to 3.2Ghz, with the next voltages I adjust the freq to 3.6Ghz stable:

CPU Voltage: 1.25
DRAM Voltage: 1.65
VTT Voltage: 1.264
PLL: 1.853
PCH: 1.100

Had a run prim95/IBT and the max temp was 60.

I had OC my RAM to 1600 1.65. Both modules are rated 1333 1.50V, HOWEVER since the RAM was overcloked I notice in game a strange increase in FPS and fluidity knowning that usually ram OC doesn't matter.

Why is this? Can I keep my RAM at 165 1600 9-9-9-24/T2 even if they are rated 1333 1.50V. How will this damage my rams on longterm?
 
Hello there :)

Are you sure that this can only be cause by your overclocked RAM? If so I have no explanation for that since I was too under the impression that OCed RAM would gain you nothing in gaming performance.

As for the safety, I think RAM can take +- 0.1 easyly, maybe +.15 too. When overclocking you run outside the rated specs anyway. As always this will of course void warranty and the lifetime of the components will decrease (this might not even be noticeable because you will upgrade before they die.

If that performance boost comes from the OCed RAM, I'd leave it that way. Otherwise I would run @ stock clocks since I think you won't benefit from OCed RAM in general.
 
On older platforms you can see some performance gain because of higher memory clock but I don't think I would actually notice that if it wasn't something like 22 vs 28 FPS.
I haven't seen any issues with memory set to 1.75V but I didn't run anything above 1.75V for longer ( like more than a week ).
 
Or maybe it's game I was experimenting bad programmed, it's about Battlefield 4, I should take as reference another game/application since I don't know any benchmark to test the ram performance.
 
It's only when you get down to DDR3-1333 that you see a minor performance penalty. The sweet spot appears to be at DDR3-1600, where you will see a minor performance increase over DDR3-1333 with only a slight increase in cost.
 
A question, is it normal to have a idle temp of 39-42 when ambient is 22 C? If i run IBT 10 times the max temp is 67C. Are the temps good, average or kinda bad?


I have a kit of 2x2GB Corsair memory, and 2 ram sticks, 1xKingston 2gb and the other Kingston 4gb, both without a radiator, I placed the kit in dual channel and both different sized kingston sticks in the other dual channel, currently I have 10GB RAM, is it bad to mix up different sized ram, I didn't notice any stability issues with this config.
 
Last edited:
Back