Manual memory overclocking - how to do it without risk?

[Microsista]

Hi,
currently i'm running my DDR3 memory at it's default XMP profile which is 1866MHz, 1.5V, and CL9-11-9-28 timings.
It works great, but i though i could squeeze a bit more performance out of them by doing some manual overclocking, and so i did.
I set the frequency to 2133MHz (which is max for my cpu/motherboard), raised the voltage to 1.65V (i think it's a good value, some memory use that in their XMP profile), and found out that lowest timings that i can boot into windows are CL9-10-10-12. But then i quickly realized that some apps/drivers were not working correctly, data on my ssd was permamently damaged so i had to format the drive and reinstall windows. I also tested the memory in memtest, and there was a lot of memory errors, i did some testing, and the results were that CL9-10-10-14 gave no errors at all in 3 loops of testing. Does that mean that the memory is 100% stable, and i will never get issues with data loss again? fourth timing also seems a bit low compared to it's default xmp settings (14 vs 28)

 

[Elixer]

There is always risk when you O/C.
Usually, if you don't push the voltage too high, you will be fine in terms of silicon.

I would run memtest86+ overnight, and see what happens. If all is good, then I would stress it with OCCT & Prime95, run those for 4-5 hours, and if all is good, you are good to go for the most part.

However, if you start seeing BSODs and other errors, you might have to back down the timings.