How hot should memory run?

[Mordred]

Since I first built this PC I had never had to remove any of my sticks of memory. When I went to upgrade to Vista, I had to remove two of them to get Vista to boot. When I shut down my PC and removed the first stick of memory it literally burned my hand, it was too hot to actually handle, and that was just from the system being idle.

I was wondering how hot memory should actually run. I have 4Gb of Newegg.com - Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Desktop Memory. When I first installed the memory, my board wanted to run it at 5-5-5-18 and 1.8v, but the manufacturer's web site states that it should run at 4-4-4-12 with 2.2v. So I just set the memory to run at the manufacturer's recommended timings and voltages. Is there something I could have done wrong while setting that up? So far (about 3 months) I have had no problems with the memory, but with my recent experience trying to install Vista, I am looking at all my hardware sideways trying to figure out the problem.

 

[veedubfreak]

2.2v is quite a bit of voltage, but thats the reason crucials have the heat spreaders. Might just want to make sure there is some decent airflow running over them. My tracers never really ran hot though, but i had an extreme amount of airflow in my case, with it being a 900.

FYI, you can most likely get them to run 4-3-3-8 at 2.2v and 800mhz

 

[Mordred]

Really? How much of a performance boost would that give me? How would I know if my system becomes unstable because of it?

Does that also mean that it would be possible to get it to run at 1066mhz?

 

[Mordred]

Hmm...just changed my timings to 4-3-3-8 and don't really notice a difference....