Legit Reviews

I'm admittedly very much a noob at computer building/tweaking/overclocking etc etc


I recently built the following comp:

E6600 (stock clocking) (Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro7 (It's HUGE!!))
Intel "badaxe 2" P975 Mobo
2GB Corsair DDR2 6400 Mem (Currently set at default clocking 800 Mhz)
ATI X-1900 XTX Video card
Creative X-FI Patinum Sound
DVD Drive
DVD RW Drive
WD SATA II 200 Gb HD

I kept all the BIOS setup at default levels until I got the system up and running. Wanting to experiment with the memory clocking, I found the “aggressive” setting in the BIOS and choose that thinking I would increase the clocking on the memory.

Well…My system would not boot.
I changed it back and everything is fine.

I want the most out of my system and read about the members here getting their CPU’s and memory to run MUCH faster.

So…Did I not use the correct method to overclock the memory??
I see a “manual-user settings” in the BIOS but having been somewhat spooked by my first attempt I haven’t fooled with it.

Any education/suggestions would be appreciated

Chuck

Generally the agressive settings on motherboards will lower latency timings on your memory, that is, how long until the CPU waits for the memory to finish reading/writing before trying to send another operation. With the timings lower the RAM has to work harder to keep up, most RAM will not work at lower latency settings than they were designed without first putting more voltage in them, but dont do this yet .

To get a better overclock from your memory, manually enter the timings as per the manufactuer's specification (are they the 5-5-5-12 corsair kits?) and see how much you can increase the FSB speed before the system is not stable (N.B. Increasing the FSB overclocks the the CPU and memory together, the CPU increaase is determined by the selected multiplier, and the RAM increase is determined by the FSB:RAM ratio).

How much of overclocking do you understand, there is so much detail I could go into here, but dont want to if you already know about it!

IMO its best to try and find the max CPU overclock you can get first without stressing the RAM too much then trying for the maximum RAM overclock you can get when you know the CPU's limits.

Dan

**edited for clarity!**

a freezer pro 7 is huge?


It's not huge, i have a Freezer 64! i guess you havent seen huge yet

Thanks for the info Dan. I've manually adjusted my RAM timings/voltage in the BIOS and everythings still running!
I'll do some more study before I launch into the FSB adjustments so I don't fry anything (just yet!). The BIOS for this board don't make it real easy (IMHO....) to figure out how to do that.

AND........I guess I haven't seen a "HUGE" CPU cooler yet

Told ya I was a noob!!

Chuck

edited the post.... Remember we are a flame free forum please.