Does my mobo OC itself to accomodate the RAM?

[thismafiaguy]

Hello, I have a GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD3 motherboard, and 2 sticks of 2GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 2000MHz RAM. The memory standards for this motherboard are:

1066/1333/1600/1866/2000(O.C.)

When I check under the memory tab in CPU-Z, it tells me that I am running these two sticks of RAM at 671MHz. Is this normal? Does the motherboard automatically crank up the power to 2000MHz when I'm gaming? Or do I have to go into the BIOS and flip an O.C. setting?

 

[o1die]

(O.C.) means you have to overclock the cpu to get the ram to 2000. The maximum ram setting is 1866 for your board bios. You may have to change the ram setting from "auto" to manual to set your ram speed. Some boards default to the lowest setting, 1066 (or 533, half the actual speed). Your ram is currently running at about 1342 (671 x 2). Try to set the speed in manual mode; let the board select the timings.

 

[inzone]

One thing you can try also is if your motherboard had the XMP setting then you can select that and that will crank up the ram some.

 

[thismafiaguy]

I looked in the memory settings, and in manual mode, it only goes up to x8.00, which is 1600MHz, or at least that's what it tells me.

How much do I have to overclock the CPU to achieve 2000MHz for the RAM?

 

[o1die]

25%; If the cpu fsb is currently set at 200, set it to 240 or 250 and see if it's stable. I would skip prime 95 and run memtest to check for errors. The maximum voltage I would run the ram at is 1.65.

 

[thismafiaguy]

Best answer selected by thismafiaguy.