Sandy Bridge RAM OC

naaczej

Commendable
Mar 19, 2016
6
0
1,510
Hello,

First off let me list my system specs:

i5 2500K @ 4.5GHz
GTX 970 3.5GB
HyperX Blu 2x4GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
AsRock P67 Performance Fatal1ty
beQuiet! 500W 80Plus Gold

I have began to hit 100% CPU usage in new games like Witcher 3 which causes frame skipping issues. As my CPU doesn't want to go any further I have been thinking about OCing my RAM to 1866MHz. Recently Digital Foundry made a video about Sandy Bridge performance nowadays and it seems that faster RAM can do wonders for these CPUs (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frNjT5R5XI4). However, I've spent some time digging the interenet and it seems that OCing RAM is a much greater deal. I'm especially worried about OS corruption which might result from this.

I'm using XMP profile set to 9-9-9-27 at 1.65v as of now. My questions are- how much risky would it be to simply change RAM frequencies to 1866MHz and leave everything else alone? Can eventual BSOD really corrupt the OS? If I succesfully manage to boot into the OS should I run some kind of test like SuperPI? How dangerous would the eventual test BSOD be then?

Best regards
 

naaczej

Commendable
Mar 19, 2016
6
0
1,510
I'm not planning to increase the voltage any higher. It is my default XMP profile. I just want to know what is the risk of increasing the frequency, without touching anything else.
 


Risk is system instability and an inability to boot. I personally wouldn't bother, memory speed doesn't affect games all that much. Instead, simply lower the graphics settings, because you're probably hitting vram limits rather than CPU ones
 

naaczej

Commendable
Mar 19, 2016
6
0
1,510
Not at all, my VRAM usage doesn't exceed 3GB in The Witcher 3. Have you watched DF video that I have mentioned? 10-15% performance boost resulting from using faster RAM I wouldn't call "all that much." In MSI afterburner I can definitely see 100% CPU usage on the graph (http://imgur.com/aLCJbSK).
 


I don't care about some random video, I'm telling you from experience (and a dozen well set up experiments from various reviewers, http://www.anandtech.com/show/4503/sandy-bridge-memory-scaling-choosing-the-best-ddr3/6) that RAM speed will generally not affect your system performance by much. Hell, from 1333MHz to 2133MHz you'll get ~1% improvement in games, and ~10% in memory limited things (7zip compression, etc)
 

naaczej

Commendable
Mar 19, 2016
6
0
1,510
The tests you are referring to are from 2011. There were last gen games all around back then. Current gen games greatly benefit from faster RAM which is proved by DF's experiments. This affects Skylake platforms especially, though older platfroms benefit as well. I wouldn't call their professional analyses random.
 


You did realize that link also had direct tests to things other than games that are far more computation heavy ? One video from one company that doesn't even do real hardware reviews is not a reason to potentially burn out your CPU.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-is-it-finally-time-to-upgrade-your-core-i5-2500k <-- that's the full article, and when you read that it's clear that their settings are NOT normal and their tests done in a non-repeatable way

But lets get back to the topic, you can try changing the clock speed, but most likely you will not be able to achieve stable clocks without boosting voltage and making the timings a bit sloppier. Do NOT raise the voltage at all, you are already at the maximum safe voltage (1.65V). If you can't get stable timings on that voltage, buy newer memory or just give up
 

naaczej

Commendable
Mar 19, 2016
6
0
1,510
Thanks for the discussion. I've decided to play it safe and just ordered these babies as they are really dirt cheap right now: http://www.gskill.com/en/product/f3-2133c9d-8gab. Hope I can squeeze out some more performance out of my old rig.