overclock ddr2 ram

[xristoforakisapostolis8]

hello! i need details about overclocking ram in bios settings. i have two ram in 5-5-5-18 2gb ddr2 and one ram in 6-6-6-18 4gb ddr2 is it dangerous to take risk and change timings in bios of ram settings? i want to make faster my pc if it posible. thank you.

 

[clutchc]

It isn't dangerous just changing timings, if by 'dangerous' you mean fatal to the machine. But if the settings are not stable, you may not be able to run without crashes or not even start at worse. To get the RAM to be stable, increasing the voltage may help. But there you get into an area where it can be fatal to the RAM or the motherboard if done carelessly.

I might suggest that you increase the freq of the CPU first. That will give you way more performance gain than the RAM. Another suggestion is to use matched pairs of RAM when you OC. Stability is really hard to get with mixed RAM. Also, using the single stick will in one of the slots will make the whole RAM system run in single channel mode instead of dual channel for about a 10% hit. Dual channel only works when both matching slots are populated. There are some exceptions to that, however. You really need to list the system specs.

 

[william p]

With modern GPUs having their own DDR5 RAM in 2 or more GB, system RAM speed isn't that big a deal. Also there's more than just timing, there's latency. The 6,6,6-18 may be just as fast as the 5,5,5-18 if it has lower latency. DDR2 covered many different chipsets with many different RAM controllers. It hard to tell how any one of them will or won't handle 2+2, and 4GB modules mixed. 4x2GB would be better. If you overclock your CPU by raising the FSB then your RAM speed will increase also and that's when you need to worry about how to make it run faster. Usually by slowing it down some 😉