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Can too much voltage slow down ram?

A

Andrew83

n00b
Joined
Sep 11, 2007
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Hi, I was wondering, as the thread title says, can too much voltage slow down your ram?

I bought 2 of these from newegg.com a couple months ago...

CORSAIR 4GB(2 x 2GB) DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145184

My friend built my rig for me from the ground up. We installed all four sticks (8 gigs worth) and Vista x64 wouldnt boot. From reading various posts around the internet, we thought it might be the voltage on the ram having an issue with my mobo. Ive got an ASUS Striker Extreme. He went and tweaked the voltage up to 2.20v in the bios. Well the ram issue turned out to be Microsoft's crappy programming of Vista and the simple need for an update. I left the ram voltage at 2.20.

The specs on the ram say 1.8v. Should I change it back to this? Will it make things faster?

I also noticed everything in Vista's performance check is maxed out at 5.9, except for my ram, which is lagging behind at 5.2. Something seems off about that considering the high end system Im running.
 
Lowest voltage is best, but while maintaining stability.
Too much voltage won't slow down ram, but it will probably blow it up due to overvoltage. *poof* I guess ram dying can be considered "slowing" down...

What speed are you running these at?

Try to see what the lowest stable voltage is.
 
It shouldn't slow it down. It could kill it, which I suppose is a way of slowing it down. :)

Drop it down to 1.8. It will run cooler. You don't want to increase the voltage unless you're overclocking and it's not stable.
 
They're not overclocked, so I suppose it wouldnt hurt to turn the voltage back to 1.8?

Any ideas on why my ram score is kinda low though compared to everything else being maxed? Not that Vista's "opinion" of my system should matter, but Im just curious.
 
What speed are you running them as?
Might actually be underclocked if you kept it at default.
 
as was said, never use more voltage than you need for stability. drop it down to 1.8v, if it's still stable, leave it there. :D

more voltage = more heat and shorter lifespan
 
I've had to raise voltage on my cruical ram up one notch after it was stable at that voltage for over a year, maybe two.

My sig still says 2.8 but a few games kept crashing, one game mainly but I forget which exact one. Anyways, after raising the voltage to 2.9, no in game crash to desktop or random reboots.
 
I went into the bios. I could turn it to auto, or the next voltage above that is like 1.85v, then 1.90v. I turned it down to 1.9. I havent been putting it under heavy load or anything, but its stable right now as Im typing this, for the past couple hours. I'll see how it goes while playing Crysis later on. That should be a stress test for it.
 
I've noticed the Asus boards have a dram throttle option in the bios. Not sure if this kicks in because of heat but less voltage is always better for everything-to a stable point of course:)
 
My mistake, I actually set it to 1.85v. Ran the Crysis demo last night to put it under som load, and it crashed my computer. Its hard to tell whether thats the reason, or whether the demo is just unstable. Probably the latter, although a lot of games seem to be crashing lately, even older ones. Maybe its just Vista sucking.
 
Which version should I go with? I downloaded the Pre-Compiled package for Floppy (DOS - Win) and did what the readme said and it comes up with an error saying its incompatibile with the version of Windows Im running. Check whether I need a x86 or x64 version of the program.

Im runnning Vista x64. Is this program compatible?
 
Simultaneously ran 6 of those, each testing a gig of ram, for about 2 and a half hours. No errors. ;)
 
now that you have the memtest disk, see if 5 5 5 15 will work, worth a shot however you might have to clear the cmos if it does not like it.
 
John_T said:
Those Corsair sticks shouldn't be run above 2.2v, 1.9v is likely to be adequate. Maybe you want to read this:

http://www.houseofhelp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63650&highlight=TWIN2X4096-6400C5DHX+8gb
Click to expand...

I read through that thread... Lets pretend, just for a bit, that I know nothing about ram, and I didnt really have much of an understanding about what I just read. What would be my best coarse of action right now for tweaking bios settings for my memory? Should I just set it back at 1.9v and deal with a crash every now and then? (More often than not, it's while gaming)
Cause I really dont like playing around in the bios. Its something Ive never felt comfortable doing. I always feel like Im going to do something that I dont really have any full knowledge about and screw up my hardware.
Im starting to think the Striker Extreme was not a wise mobo choice for me...
 
You really can "screw up your hardware" by changing the settings in BIOS unless you up the voltage too much and fry something.

The only real issue that may arise is a no boot issue which will require you to reset the BIOS and start over... make sure to write down settings that work (if different then default) when messing around in the BIOS. That way you don't have to try to remember what you had stuff set at.

As for the RAM making it crash every once in a while when set at 1.9v... I would try it at 1.95v to see if it clears it up. A lot of the time, motherboards will not supply enough juice to the RAM especially when having a ton of it installed.

Moral of the story.. don't be afraid to mess around in BIOS and/or overclock. Just keep track of stable settings, voltages, and temps and you should be fine.
 
Alright, Ive been running my ram at 1.9v and I think things seem to be a little more stable.

I was looking at things in my nVidia control panel... Could someone take a look at my settings and see if everything looks the way it should. Im not really having any problems, but I just like it when things run optimally. Im not too familiar with what all the memory timings represent either. You've gotta learn somewhere though...

MoboSettings.jpg


Also I know this is the memory forum, but I was considering overclocking my CPU just a bit, but wondering how to do that safely. I know heat is the biggest thing to slow performance. My massive heatsink seems to cool things very well as you can see. Under load it doesnt go too much higher than 30ºC. How much higher than 2.93ghz do you think I can safely go on an air cooled setup without causing problems?
 
Memtest is not a stability test. All memtest does is make sure your ram is not faulty. To check stability you need to use something like Orthos.
 
Well, my RAM seems to not be faulty, but I was just wondering if all my timings and whatnot look like they're set correctly. And if anyone has any input on overclocking like i mentioned in my previous post, help / suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
 
For that 5.2 in the Vista scale, I had the same thing in my similar (not as BA, but similar) system.

Run the RAM without a divider (at the same speed as the FSB).

CPU was set to 266x9 on my Q6600. RAM was running at whatever it was defaulted at. 5.9's across the board with teh exception memory at a 5.2.

Dropped the CPU to 400x6, made sure that the RAM was running at 400Mhz, and voila...5.9's in all the perfomance catagories! Apperently its a known issue with Intel systems.

I hope I explained it well enough...Im not a very good teacher :)
 
joerocket23 said:
For that 5.2 in the Vista scale, I had the same thing in my similar (not as BA, but similar) system.

Run the RAM without a divider (at the same speed as the FSB).

CPU was set to 266x9 on my Q6600. RAM was running at whatever it was defaulted at. 5.9's across the board with teh exception memory at a 5.2.

Dropped the CPU to 400x6, made sure that the RAM was running at 400Mhz, and voila...5.9's in all the perfomance catagories! Apperently its a known issue with Intel systems.

I hope I explained it well enough...Im not a very good teacher :)
Click to expand...


Im afraid Im not quite following you. But I have a feeling you might be putting me on the right track. Im not getting the performance I expected to be getting with my system, but from the beginning Ive had a feeling it has to do with the timings/speeds you mentioned. I suppose I could use educating what all that means as well. I should really read up on all this.

How do you go about adjusting them? Is it something I can do with this little nTune program from nVidia, or must I go back into the bios that I love so much?
 
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