Ballistix 8500 Tuning

turbotom

Junior Member
Dec 23, 2007
9
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First off...it took me forever to get the exact voltages to get the 4x1gb of RAM stable.
It was horribly unstable if voltages were slightly too high or slightly too low, but now that I figured it out it's rock solid. (And heart touching, at least according to the text on the box that the motherboard came in.)
Heart Touching!
FYI, 2x1gb of the same ram was far less finicky on the mobo.

Anyway, I'm currently running the ram at 1066 5-3-4-7. I'm still fiddling with the timings to figure out what gives me the best bandwidth. It crashes with a CAS any lower than 5 @ 1066. The tRAS is weird. I can set it as low as 1 and it runs stable, but I found that I get the best bandwidth at 7 (at least in the current configuration.)
Does anyone have experience with this RAM and know what timings I should try?
The BIOS has tons of other timings I can tweak, but if they're all like the tRAS where higher can be better, it will take me decades to test them all. If anyone has a clue, I'd love to be filled in.

The best bandwidth I've gotten yet was with 800 @ 3-3-3-5, but I figure I might be able to get a bit more out of it at 1066.
 

Sylvanas

Diamond Member
Jan 20, 2004
3,752
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Nice results, what voltage are you running? The ballistix are under warranty up to 2.2v so should be no problems there- I am pretty sure the 8500's are D9GHM IC's so there should be plenty of results online to compare it with. On my Intel setup I had my 4x1GB Ballistix 5300 @ 1100mhz 5-5-5-15 2.3v which I found to be a sweet spot- good thing about the Nvidia 6x0i/SLI chipsets are the option to run your memory 'unlinked'. If you really want the most bandwidth possible you'll want to look into tweaking the subtimings and I suggest downloading a tool named 'memset' (google 'memset' and 'xtremesystems') then you can change the subtiming values from windows and test for stability.