RAM tuning/overclocking? :: Hardware and Operating Systems

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Konk 4 Jul @ 1:45am

RAM tuning/overclocking?

decided to see how much performance i could get out of my RAM, so ive been testing out different settings in the BIOS to see what is most stable. i dont really have much experience overclocking, but i wanted to give it a shot anyway.

by default i had my 32GBs running at 3200MT/s with 22-22-22-22-52 timings. i have a MSI B450 Tomahawk board, and in the BIOS it has some preset up RAM profiles i could set it to. the one ive been testing is 3200MT/s 16-18-18-18-36. i immediately felt the latency difference, but it was slightly unstable. from the desktop i randomly got booted back to the sign-in screen once; besides that, that is the only issue ive run into. i did test some games and what not and everything was fine. i decided to run a stress tester on the RAM and it did come back with one or two errors. i am now trying out the same profile, but setting the command rate to 2T to see if that could help some what.

i guess my question is how stable is good enough? is any crashing, or errors in stress tests a hard no-go, or can i still work with that? does the system need to be 100% stable, or is it not worth the risk?

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Showing 1-9 of 9 comments

Bad 💀 Motha 4 Jul @ 1:50am

Tweak the CPU and those voltage settings; put the RAM on XMP/AMP

RAM is very sensitive don't OC it.

Even if you "could" OC RAM by say 100-200Mhz; 99% of the things you do on the PC it won't make any real world performance difference.

Faster timings is better then a little higher Mhz bandwidth

Last edited by Bad 💀 Motha; 4 Jul @ 1:52am

_I_ 4 Jul @ 1:54am

unstable ram would not just boot you back to login, unless it did a bsod and auto reboot

disable that in system settings so it does not reboot after bsod and actually shows the error

test with mtest86+ or windows memory test before trying to boot with overclocked ram

most ram does not like to be overclocked since the mfg could sell it as higher binned dimm/kit

any crashing with bad ram is bad
it can corrupt drivers or settings that can cause problems even after the ram is stable again

Last edited by _I_; 4 Jul @ 1:55am

C1REX 4 Jul @ 3:30am

Originally posted by Konk:
i guess my question is how stable is good enough? is any crashing, or errors in stress tests a hard no-go, or can i still work with that? does the system need to be 100% stable, or is it not worth the risk?

In my personal opinion it should be 100% stable. Any instability can mean that you are pushing the memory controller on your CPU too hard what can lead to silicon degradation.
And even if it’s stable and passes every stress test, it can still degrade prematurely and slowly get less stable after few months or so. Even standard EXPO/DOCP/XMP without additional tweaking can lead to that if it’s a fast and hard to run memory and you are unlucky with silicon lottery.

Bad 💀 Motha 4 Jul @ 4:32pm

Disable Fast Boot in BIOS.

Disable Hibernation + Fast Startup in WinOS.

Disable Auto Reboots in OS with regards to errors / blue acreen.

Do not put extra needless apps in OS startup such as Steam or other game clients.

A&A 4 Jul @ 7:52pm

If you get a single error = No go

And I don't believe that changing the command rate from 1 to 2 will make a difference, given that it is more useful at a higher frequency where signal rooting becomes a problem.

Last edited by A&A; 4 Jul @ 8:05pm