RAM Voltage Question about CPU

xNoahx

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Feb 11, 2013
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Hi guys, this is my first time asking a question on the forum. I tried enabling X.M.P. on my system with my 16GB "1600mhz" Kingston Hyper X Genesis RAM through the ASUS BIOS (To change the mhz from 1333 to 1600), and when I checked my voltage after about an hour of staying on idle, it was 1.65v. I immediately went back to the BIOS and disabled X.M.P. and my RAM returned to 1.5v (and 1333mhz). I am very scared because I have an Intel i7 3770k processor and I have heard that with Ivy Bridge, you should only have a ram voltage of 1.5v. Is there any way I can tell if any damage has been done to my RAM, CPU, etc?
 
I heard that intel should use the 1.5voltage as well, just go in the bios move the ram speed to 1600 and the voltage should stay untouched. There should be no damage done for ur cpu, ram, etc my bro in law ran some Kingston hyper x at 1.65 with his i7, but i beleive his other kingston ram was 1.5 or something and they both defaulted to the 1.5v
 

ocmusicjunkie

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Jun 6, 2012
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There isn't much risk of harming anything by overvolting your memory except for possibly damaging the memory itself. If you did this, it would probably be evident fairly soon. If you are really concerned, you could always run Memtest http://www.memtest86.com/

Every current Asus mobo I've seen lists 1.65v models of memory in the compatibility list. With that being the case, it's pretty hard to picture that you could have done anything to the board. The processor definitely wouldn't be impacted regardless of what you did with your memory. I'm not 100% certain what the logic is behind needing 1.5v memory for specific Intel chips, but I strongly suspect the real emphesis is simply that you need to purchase quality, fast memory, which generally isn't 1.65v rated. With a few noteworthy exceptions, usually specifying anything over 1.5v is a cheap way to rate the memory with better clock or latency specs without having to really increase quality.