Overclocking noob question... do I need a little bump to my RAM voltage?

[rudder]

I have an MSI p55-gd45 motherboard with a Core i5-750 cpu. When I originally bought the system I bought G.Skill ripjaw series PC312800. I bought 4 2gb sticks to fully populate the board.

With that config I was able to do a basic overclock and get 3.2ghz with do nothing other that changing the fsb to 158. Perfectly stable.

Fast forward to the future where I think I needed more RAM... well it was justified for a photoshop project. Anyway... I now have 4 X 4GB Gskill Ripjaw PC310666.

Running stock I can stress it all day long. Bumping the FSB up to 158 and I start getting random BSOD's... and memtest will start reporting errors.

This RAM is the same voltage as the 2GB sticks... but was wondering if I needed to bump up the voltage slightly to maintain stability.

 

[jvroig]

Since memtest reported errors, then yes.

Worst case, if it doesn't solve the problem, perhaps you need to lower the speed of your RAM a bit now that you have 4 sticks.

Actually, the worst case I can think of is your max OC might get lowered now that you are using 4 sticks instead of 2. Hopefully, that doesn't happen, so just see what you can get with a bump in voltage.

EDIT: Ah, I see your overclock isn't quite extreme, I suppose it just needs a small bump in RAM voltage unless those last 2 sticks happened to be exceptionally poor.

 

[aigomorla]

if you played with FSB most of the time you will need to bump ram voltage.

Reason being said, is because your no longer on stock ram settings.

Lets assume this scenario.

Your stock FSB is 133, so your ram is also running @ 133.
Without playing with a memory divider, you overclock your cpu's fsb to 200mhz.
This will also overclock your ram bus speed to 200mhz.

Now if your ram was @ 1066mhz you now just bump'd it to 1600mhz.

This bump will require more voltage, and also its a good idea to get active cooling as well.

Edit: On an i5/i7, the ram is also linked to VTT.
You might need more VTT

 

[rudder]

aigomorla, that makes sense. I guess I was lucky with the 2gb sticks they handled it well. And I did buy a fan to cool these.

jvroig, I hope to get back to my meager 3.2... I do have a decent cooling setup (corsair H50) and a ton of fans to move air... so I hope I can experiment and really push it. I've owned the cpu for almost a year. I have the upgrade bug so I am hoping this will satisfy me since there is nothing too compelling out there now.

 

[jvroig]

there is nothing too compelling out there now.

If you can overclock your i5-750 to anything within the 3.6- 4.0 range, that is absolutely true, unless you are looking to use more than 4 threads constantly / regularly.