Why overlock RAM?

[CreditSolutions]

Does it really make that big of a difference? I thought FSB and CPU core clock speed were the biggest factors. Are you guys just gung-ho on overclocking?

I could understand if you needed to increase your RAM's mhz in order to increase your FSB/HTT (Say you wanted to leave the ratio alone), but why mess with timings?

Is there any other benefit?

 

[FadingTheory]

Any increases in speed in any component is good. RAM speed has had a steady progression over the years, so its not like this is anything new.

Your right however, in the fact that RAM speed is less important than CPU perimeters.

Personally, I wouldn't do it. RAM that can safely overclocked cost a good more than standard RAM.

 

[Nubius]

thought FSB and CPU core clock speed were the biggest factors. Are you guys just gung-ho on overclocking?

FSB is only obtained by a combination of the CPU's FSB and the RAMs stock speed. If you have your CPU at 220x10 = 2.2GHz you have 440FSB (in the case of socket A's anyway), but if your RAM is still DDR400 or 400FSB basically, then that extra clock speed isn't helping you all that much.

A CPU overclocked to 2.2GHz with say 480FSB and the RAM following it at 240MHz (240x2 = 480) would be a more optimized and faster system than a CPU clocked to 2.4GHz but still being left at 400FSB.

The timings on the RAM are important because you have to relax them when you overclock the RAM to get those higher speeds, this allows for more bandwidth to be processed.

Using SiSoftware Sandra normal PC3200 would be 3000/2800 in reference to gb/sec transfer. At 235MHz opposed to stock 200MHz I would get 3500/3300 gb/sec so you can see this would simply help in terms of speed of communication to the rest of the system.

Like I said thought, if the CPU FSB is higher than the RAMs or vice versa, then you're wasting potential and you're just bottlenecking the system...and OC'ing just the CPU by itself by use of multi's will only get you so far in terms of performance.

OC'ing the CPU and RAM and keeping them at 1:1 ratio is by far the most optimized way to get actual system results in terms of speed..

Also yes we're gung-ho on overclocking

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

Well said nubius

It's hard to increase the CPU speed without touching the ram.

 

[stevedub]

You guys blow my mind with all this OC'ing info. I hope to one day become as knowleged, so I can build my own kick ass system

 

[20mm]

can't you just buy ram that runs at a higher mhz then the cpu and just oc the cpu to match it so you don't have to oc the ram?


say you have a cpu that runs at an fsb of 400mhz and you get ram that runs at 533mhz and you just up the cpu...if you could even folow that.

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

Yep you can get that kind of ram. Most samsung TCCD is rated to run at 4400 speeds? and the sticks that are rated at 3200 can run at 4400 speeds and higher anyways.

 

[20mm]

i may try that with the new computer. we have 533mhz corsair ram with a 3.4 intel, i think i'll have a bit of fun!

 

[idiotec]

i may try that with the new computer. we have 533mhz corsair ram with a 3.4 intel, i think i'll have a bit of fun!

That is my scenerio. I have ddr2 533, so that means by putting that ram to 1:1, I can overclock the fsb to 266 without technically overclocking the ram. If you do want to do this make sure you change the ratio though, because right now if you have a p4 with 533 ram that ratio in the bios is at 4:3 so the ram still runs at 533 even when the fsb is at 200. Before raising the fsb as high as 266, you will want to put that ratio down to 1:1.

 

[Nubius]

can't you just buy ram that runs at a higher mhz then the cpu and just oc the cpu to match it so you don't have to oc the ram?

Yeah but if I had that, I'd just OC it to DDR600 Then my 'DDR533' would be better than yours

Now a socket A board wouldn't be able to do that, but the AMD64's would

300HTT easily