Is this memory not good for OC?

[boneca1]

I spend few hours last night overclocking my system, went as high as 3.0GHz and I think this all I can do with this memory.

Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 (rev 3.3) - BIOS F13 (late 2008)
E6600 @ 2.4GHz
8GB (2 x4 ) Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 (PC-6400) Latency (5-5-5-18) (got it for the price)
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
LIAN LI PC-A05B

I was able to get up to 2.91GHz without any voltage or memory tweaking just by changing FSB. When I went up to around 330 the system wouldn?t POST.
I went back to the BIOS and lowered memory divider. The system booted up fine. I ran Prime 95 v25.6 (64bit) for 6h. 33min and it ran with 0 errors and 0 warnings.
I assuming that system is pretty stable. The HWMonitor shows CPU and Memory temperatures are normal.

Is this maximum I can do with kind of hardware? Should I exchange this memory for something with lower latency?

One more thing. Sometimes after restart settings in BIOS getting reversed to original settings. How?s that possible? The new settings were saved.

 

[PClark99]

If those are 4GB sticks then they might be very limited in how much they overclock.

Best bet is reduced the RAM divider like you did to run them at lower speed.

Try running the chip at 400 FSB with the RAM running a 1:1 multiplier so it isn't overclocked at all.

Then play with CPU voltage to see if you can boot at 3600. That should be your target. If you have a decent E6600 you should be able to hit that.

Bottom line, RAM speed really doesn't effect much aside from e-peener benchmarks, unless you have the money to waste getting different RAM I wouldn't bother, quantity over quality is preferable.

 

[boneca1]

Thanks for reply PClark99, nope those are 2GB sticks (I think I mislead in my post above) it's 4 sticks by 2GB. I tried to run at 400 FSB and tried to tweak the voltages but I wasn't successful. It wouldn't boot with whatever settings I tried. I couldn't find exact/right numbers for voltages so I tried different combination's and none of them were good. The idea was to have 1:1 ratio as my memory DDR2-800.

 

[KingstonU]

I often read that having 4 ram sticks is also a problem and limits overclocking.

 

[katank]

w/ 4 sticks, you may need to add a bit to NB/MCH while overclocking, not just to DDR voltage.

 

[PClark99]

what katank said is totally true.

you will need more voltage on your board to even have a chance overclocking 4 sticks of RAM.

 

[CoinOperatedBoy]

400FSB isn't a cakewalk for every E6600. Mine has trouble when I start nearing 390 and I have decent cooling on both the CPU and NB. I had my Vcore up to 1.45V and my MCH bumped up by .3V before I decided to stop trying. That was even when I had only two sticks of RAM. I can run 377MHz completely stable with 1.4V Vcore and a slight bump to MCH, and that's also with four sticks.

You may just have RAM that does not overclock well. Those timings are not that great, so they might have to get even more slack for you to get more speed. You might be better off with DDR1066 RAM or some DDR800 with low voltage requirements and better timings that you can loosen on your own.