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Been awhile since i've built a computer : Ram voltage

B

BadMrFrosty

Member
Ok, its been awhile since I built a computer, like.. since I had a 1.8GHz celeron. So last week I built the following box:

K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI
Amd Athlon 64 3500+
1GB corsair 3200 DDR Twinx(matched for dual)
120GB Seagate Sata Drive
256MB PCI-E eVGA 6800 GeForce GT

The problem I'm having is when I play games, specifically World of Warcraft; I get alot of file corruption. Apparently alot of people get these issues with WoW, its because their files are huge 500MB files and they're constantly being compressed/uncompressed in your ram, and if you have bad ram, or something flakey in your system it will show up more than in other games; or at least that is how Blizzard explains the problem.

So, per their suggestion I ran memtest86 on my machine overnight, sure enough it found quite a few problems. So I did the isolation method, i removed one DIMM and ran the test (no errors) I put the other one in, and got some errors.

So I figured OK I dont have any errors now, great I just need to return my bad ram and get it replaced. But then I noticed that even with the one that Memtest86 said was good I still had the occasional "flash to 1ms bluescreen then immediate reboot" issue that I was getting, albiet alot more frequently with BOTH sticks of ram in there. Then I got curious, so I started reading.

"Due to the High Performance Memory design, motherboards or system configurations may or may not operate smoothly at the JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) standard settings (BIOS Default on the motherboard) such as DDR voltage, memory speeds and memory timing. Please confirm and adjust your memory setting in the BIOS accordingly for better system stability."

Above is an excerp from my motherboard manual.

I always thought you werent supposed to mess with voltage settings if you want ultimate stability, in fact I thought if you changed your voltage it could wreck your PC. Am I wrong? has this changed?

CMX512-3200XL other info on the module is xms3200v1.2 then it says 400mhz 2.2.2.5

That is the ram that I have, I have no idea what voltage it should be, but my motherboard has it set at 2.70v right now.

Any advice is very appreciated as I dont want to send this ram back only to find out im doing something wrong.

Thanks,
BMF
 
The board is overvolting your RAM a bit anyway. 2.6V is standard but most RAM made in the last year should be just fine up to 2.9V.

That said, you've run memtest, you have errors. It's time for Corsair to make good on their warranty. You've already done more than most people would and I can't see that you done anything wrong. Send it back.
 
The default voltage for DDR is 2.6V but unless you are using a Digital meter to measure the voltage, you don't really know what it is. The hardware monitor software is notoriously inaccurate and generally to the low side. After you have found out what the voltage really is (may take a bit of effort to locate the test point), bump it up 0.05 or 0.1V at a time and retest the memory. If you can't get a clean test by the time you get to 2.9V (per the meter) and you are running ALL other system parameters at default (RAM parameters set by SPD). Then RMA the memory.

.bh.
 
I'm sure your testing recommendations are sound, but that seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for some memory that should just work. It's not like he's asking it to run out of spec; it should work with out crashing, but it doesn't. Why not just RMA it?
 
Bump it up to 2.8V and rerun memtest. The guy on the other forum is right, 2.8V won't do anything to your mobo. If it did, it wouldn't be listed as a BIOS option. See what happens.
 
The only time I "crank" up the juice on my memory is when i am doing extreme over clocking and then it does sometime help with stability.

Ausm
 
Corsair XMS Memory (at least the 2-2-2-5 ones) are rated @ 2.75v. Therefore bumping up to 2.8v is perfectly fine.
Also, make sure you have a quality PSU.
 
I have seen over 3.0 volts to some of the same RAM on various setups, with no ill effects. 2.8 - 2.9 volts is perfectly safe with CMX512-3200XL. I would crank it to see if it stabilizes. It is good to do so if it has heat spreaders anyways. It helps the HS contact better.
 
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