DDR voltages; how much is too much?

S

Spewn

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 5, 2001
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Basically, just like the topic says: how much is too much? I know overvolting a cpu reduces it's life, but cooling helps prevent that from happening. I've felt my ram modules from time to time, and they've never even been warm to the touch(even after a few hours of benchmarking/torture testing), is cooling/heatspreading necessary if I want to bump the voltage up? Or am I just going to be possibly looking at getting new ram sometime? Just wondering if it's hit and miss, or if there's anything I can actively do to prevent my ram from dying due to overvoltage :p

The main reason I ask is that overvolting my ram from 2.6 to 2.8v let me run tighter timings, and now that I'm running the uber bios I could run my ram at 2.9 if I wanted, but I'm wondering if that's safe. It may be necessary to keep my ram timings as tight as they are if I want to go much higher fsb wise(sitting at 202 right now, and 11-3-3-2.5).
 
I have my Mushkin at 2.8V, mobo won't let me go higher without volt modding. And 3.4V? Yikes. Although, granted, BH-5 chips really love high voltage.
 
A month is hardly long enough to determine the longetivity of the sticks.

I'm thinking that there will be PC4000 memory with CAS2 timings by this time next year, so I'm thinking of just running at 3.2V and enjoying the increased performance, then upgrading when they die.
 
Originally posted by computerpro3
its safe. I'm at 3.4volts for a month now.
Click to expand...

Yer a mad man.

Specs on my sticks say +.1v I believe. They don't give any more at higher volts anyway like premium ram does.:mad:
 
i'm not a mad man, go over to www.xtremesystems.org/forums and check out the bh-5 voltage thread...3.4 volts 24/7 is about average with some as high as 3.8 for benching and 3.6 24/7 day to day. Tons of people have higher voltage then me. My memory chips love the voltage. Plus I can eek 530mhz 2-2-2-5 outta them. Plus, they can loop memtest test# 5 without problems. Longest I've let it go is 10 hours (time from I wake up to when I get home from school). No errors at all. 100% prime stable too. The way I look at it is that by the end of the year, I'll have a 4ghz prescott with ddrII so why not use this memory for all its worth...after all I payed a ton to get it. And if anybody doesnt believe me, LMK and I will take a picture of the multimeter with the voltage on it. And yes, If you look at my sig, you will see that I modded my psu lines to give me the voltage sufficient to push that through the ram. And JoJo from Anandtech modded my motherboard with vdimm and droop mods. I modded the psu to give me 3.5v on the 3.3v line, 12.20 on the 12v line, and 5.2 on the 5v line. Vdimm voltage with my mod is the 3.3v lines voltage -.1. So with 3.5v on the 3.3v line, I get 3.4v. The memory tops out around 45C via thermisistor, so I figure I'm fairly safe for a few months.
 
My Mushkin Level II BH-6 chip loves voltage also. im running a a64 3000+ on a kv8-max3. Right now ...220 FSB @ 3.0vdimm. Memtest passed 240 fsb, but Windows XP corrupts anything past 225 fsb.... im sticking to 220 for now. these bh-6 chips LOVE the voltage. My motherboard allows 3.2vdimm stock..very nice for overclocking.
 
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