A few memory questions...

Q

Qonfused

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 5, 2005
Messages
71
I'm looking at overhauling my system soon, but I haven't had a need to keep up with technology so I'm kind of in the dark about this stuff. I'm looking at these two sticks of ram: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231114 which I'm told the timings on it look fantastic. But then why are these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231065 more expensive with slower timings? Uhg... -.-

Side question: what's all this about AM2 needed to match the RAM perfectly or something? I'm not sure I remember all of it... hopefully one of you can fill in the blanks.
 
Yeah, I'm guessing that's a typo as well. A lot of Newegg reviews are saying it has defaulted at 5-5-5-15 although a good group of them said they applied the 4-4-3-5 timings just fine.
 
yep, thats the way it works now, when the P965 boards came out they all set the ram voltage to 1.8V which is standard for DDR2. Trouble is the manuf had used the pre-Programmed SPD chip to setup the overclocking settings so users (cause we are stoopid) did not have to mess with ram timings. Trouble is, if the ram needed more than 1.8 -1.9 volts to work, board tries to boot with Vdimm at 1.8 and it wont boot because ram fails POST testing. This caused major havoc last summer.

So now the ram manuf put standard JEDEC slow timings in the SPD chip to make sure it will boot and then you have to go into the bios and set up the advertised "overclocker" timings and voltages.

So almost everything will default to 5 5 5 15 or 5 5 5 18 if you just slap it in a boot. A lot of people have no clue as you can tell by the reviews. To be fair I did not either until last summer when I found out the hard way :D

To be fair to the ram manuf, it was mostly Intel being the super conservative people they are, deciding on the 1.8V default and not programming into the bios to try other voltages, in the rush to get new boards to market a lot of board manuf missed the potential problem and all hell broke loose. The bios on most boards is a little more forgiving but not a lot so the ram guys play it safe.
 
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