Legit Reviews

Adjusting the TRC Memory Setting is Important

Have you ever seen a setting called Trc in your motherboard's advanced memory settings page? Today Legit Reviews looks at this parameter and what it means to system performance. By lowering the Trc value from 35 to 15 on a kit of Corsair PC2-10000C5 modules we were able to improve performance across the board. How much you ask? Read on to find out!


Article Title: Adjusting the TRC Memory Setting is Important
Article URL: http://legitreviews.com/article/458/1/

The Row Cycle Time determines the length of time for the entire row-open, row-refresh cycle to complete and back in the days of DDR1 memory provided marginal gains if any when adjusted.

Not quite true! I've actually found Trc to be very beneficial for DDR1 ram too!
Most bios's set this to ~13 by default, but if you have good ram you can set it to 7 (if your ram can handle it) and get a very nice boost in bandwidth!!!!

kenc51 wrote:

The Row Cycle Time determines the length of time for the entire row-open, row-refresh cycle to complete and back in the days of DDR1 memory provided marginal gains if any when adjusted.

Not quite true! I've actually found Trc to be very beneficial for DDR1 ram too!
Most bios's set this to ~13 by default, but if you have good ram you can set it to 7 (if your ram can handle it) and get a very nice boost in bandwidth!!!!

Last time I used DDR1 it was already set to 6/7 at 400MHz, so maybe that's why I never saw a big improvement.

Does the Hex spd editr allow you to set your own epp's?

Dan

To my understanding if you know what you are doing you can make your own "EPP" profile and put it on a module that doesn't have one as it's all unused space.

You need to be VERY careful about changing bytes in the JEDEC portion of the SPD. For instance if you reprogrammed the tRC on a module with a standard PC6400 SPD to make it run at a tRC of 15 at PC10000 automatically your BIOS would try to set up the tRC at 9 which might not allow your system to even POST.

It's much safer to change those values from within the BIOS that way if something doesn't work you can just clear the BIOS and over again...

drexor69 wrote:You need to be VERY careful about changing bytes in the JEDEC portion of the SPD. For instance if you reprogrammed the tRC on a module with a standard PC6400 SPD to make it run at a tRC of 15 at PC10000 automatically your BIOS would try to set up the tRC at 9 which might not allow your system to even POST.

It's much safer to change those values from within the BIOS that way if something doesn't work you can just clear the BIOS and over again...

Agreed and that's why it's reserved for those that don't mind losing the lifetime warranty and all that jazz!

Good article. May I also suggest MemSet 3.2

IRQ Conflict wrote:Good article. May I also suggest Memtest 3.2

I think you meant to say MemSet and that too is a great utility.

that was fast lol, yup, thats what I meant thx! ;)

Saves joe sixpack from having to play with hex.