Is my memory running at the right frequency?

[bencolligan]

Helloooo,

Recently, I have been noticing someone decrease in two things on my system, one being the loading times in games and two being the fact that if I try and watch a video in the background on my other monitor while trying to play a game on my main monitor then the YouTube video freezes most of the time - even though I remember being able to do this a couple months ago or so...

I looked on Speccy to try and find if there is a problem with my memory, I have this exact memory btw https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Corsair-Dominator-ddr3-6GB/292515923554?hash=item441b4ec662:g:86MAAOSwwI1ajXTw, and I found on the RAM tab next to DRAM frequency it says around 680Mhz. Should I say something higher like 1666Mhz because thats what my RAM is supposed to be running at or have I just got some things confused?

 

[Barty1884]

The "DDR" part of DDR3 (or any other for that matter) stands for "double data rate".

So 680MHz x2 = 1360MHz (an odd number, but is likely 1333MHz)

1333MHz is the JEDEC standard for DDR3, which is what it will run at out of the box.
Higher speeds are attained by enabling the XMP profile within the BIOS.

With XMP enabled, you'd see 800MHz (so x2 = 1600MHz).


As for the other issues, please post your full system spec.

Slow load times could be the result of a slow (or failing) hard drive.
Videos crashing on Youtube could be RAM related, among other things.

 

[bencolligan]

Oh okay, thanks for explaining. Would you advise me enabling the XMP Profile in the BIOS then?

 

[Barty1884]

Yes, absolutely. Provided you're running a matched "kit"*, they should work just fine.

*Individual modules, sold separately, may have slight variations in voltages/timings required within the profile, so may result in instability.

 

[bencolligan]

Thank you man, I have had a PC for the past 3 to 5 years and I have never known this 😛