 I have been promising a RAM overclocking guide for seemingly forever So I've got the Kingston HyperX blue 4gig kit of DDR3 memory on my test bench today In addition to that I do have a HyperX RAM fan, which I did an unboxing of a while back I found it to be extremely high quality I really like the look of it overall and the other relevant things that I have today on my test bench are a core i7 875k unlocked CPU so that's what's going on under the hood over here And then I'm using a p7p 55d e premium motherboard in case you are wondering so the first thing We're gonna do today is we're gonna get everything set up for a baseline reading so that means I've got my CPU set up at Stock frequency, and I've actually turned off turbo mode, so we are just gonna be running it at pure stock frequency This is gonna allow us to see Exactly what impact just changing the memory has on an otherwise completely stable baseline System okay the other thing that I've done is I've enabled the XMP profile for this memory So that goes ahead and changes all the memory timings for me isn't that handy? Make sure you buy memory with XMP if you don't want to fuss around with all of this stuff So it goes ahead changes the frequency to 1600 megahertz changes the timings to 999 27 These are your primary timings the most important one is this one right here. That is the CAS CAS latency so here this frequency that is the speed of the memory so that's how How fast it cycles around these ones are the delay so higher this and lower this is always better 1n or 1t or 2n or 2t that's a secondary timing that does have an impact on performance as well And then these voltages that it's dialed in for me 1.65 That's the memory voltage and 1.3. That is the voltage of the integrated memory controller on the CPU You should be aware that with core i7 and core i5 CPUs You should never go over 1.65 volts on the memory because you can damage the memory controller that is built into the CPU So we're gonna go ahead take some baseline readings And then we're gonna come back and play around with some of these settings a little bit and see how much more performance we can squeeze out of this memory Now that we've got the RAM dialed into our stock XMP overclocked profile You can see here all of these settings are correct and the CPU is running at its stock frequency We're just going to take a couple of benchmarks as a baseline here So super pi is a popular memory benchmark because what it does is it gives you probably the Largest possible separation between Like my mute setting basically it's it's a very very fine way of measuring the the performance of the CPU and RAM and it'll give you Differences that you otherwise wouldn't be able to measure so you can figure out if what you're doing is beneficial or not So you can see we calculated pi to 1 million decimal places and we end up with a result of Zooming in so I can see oh no, that's not right Calculate 1 million decimal places. It's giving me the wrong one here. So now click to start. Okay, and Let's find out what we get this time and we're gonna take a quick 3d mark reading as well And then we're gonna come back to these benchmarks once we've played around with the frequency Latencies of the memory and we're going to see how much we are able to improve our system performance So there that is the real value is a 14.305 seconds seconds All right, so we're gonna run 3d mark and then I'll be back in a minute once that's done So there you have it our baseline 3d mark. Oh 6 reading is 185 3 4 so one 18,000 534 3d marks. It should also be noted. I am running these benchmarks with turbo mode Disabled on the CPU so it is running only at the default CPU multiplier of 22 X it is not scaling up when I run intensive benchmarks This is just to isolate the RAM as the performance variable that we're looking at today so the first thing we're gonna try today is Leaving our timings at default leaving all the voltage is the same because we don't really want it That's outside the scope of this particular video We don't want to tinker around with those and what we're gonna go ahead and do is take the CPU ratio and turn it down So we're still very close to the 2.9 to 6 Target CPU frequency and then we're going to turn up the base clock now turning up the base clock is gonna give us a bit Of a boost at equal frequency on the CPU and then it's also going to give us at the same DDR3 speed So I'm gonna go ahead so 146 is where I'm headed So 133 is stock you can see at 133 the options I have are all of your standard DDR3 Speed options, but as soon as I go up to 146 that 1600 megahertz option turns into 1750 So we're gonna go ahead and see if we can boot up at these speeds and if we are stable and what kind of performance Impact that's going to make Okay, I've done some tinkering around and staying within the same CPU frequency range so about 2.93 gigahertz I have found that the highest I was able to go was by lowering the CPU ratio to 17x and increasing the base clock to 172 so this gives us a DDR3 speed of 2.064 gigahertz the RAM was stable at this speed So we're gonna take some more benchmarks And we're going to find out what we gained by increasing the memory speed to 2 gigahertz Now one thing that I do want to point out is that you do not have to run the CPU at stock speed in fact There's probably more benefit to overclocking the RAM when you're running an overclocked CPU because the CPU needs more data to keep it fed But the reason that I did it this way is because what you'd normally do is find your max CPU frequency in this case I'm pretending my max CPU frequency is stock speed so you find your max CPU frequency, and then you'd tune the RAM from there so once you by the time you're tuning RAM you're already trying to stay within kind of a fixed range of CPU frequencies, so we'll go ahead fire up CPU Z fire up super pi so you can see it We're running our CPU at stock speed our RAM is now running substantially faster. This is one half of the actual data rate because it is DDR Class of memory so we're running start to calculate to 1 million decimal places So here we are we've seen a 25 percent increase in RAM speed and let's see how much of a speed increase we will gain From that so fourteen point two two seven is our new super pi Fourteen point two two seven is our new super pi score, and then we'll go ahead and have a look at the 3d mark score in a moment So we end up with a score of eighteen thousand six hundred and ninety two Which is a slight boost over what we were recording as our baseline although? It's pretty much within the margin of error so the overclocking method that we use today was just increasing the RAM frequency We found it didn't have much of an impact, but Look at it this way you buy the HyperX blue and obviously your results may vary You can get upwards of a 25 percent increase in speed over what it's actually rated for which even if it only gives you like a One percent increase in a couple of the programs you use it is a free increase nonetheless So we're gonna see how low we can go with latency overclocking and see if we can get some bigger boosts that way Stay tuned for more by simply adjusting the latencies we were able to go from 999 27 latencies all the way down to 777 20 and when you consider the cost difference Between kits that are otherwise basically identical so you look at kits like this where it's a 4gig kit 2 by 2 gigabyte DDR3 1600 and CL 9 versus CL 8 and you see upwards of a $20 price Delta well It starts to make like an overclocking friendly kit like the blue that we're using today look like a pretty good value if you can Get all of that extra headroom out of it, so let's have a look at our super pi calculation for our C7 overclocking In this case latency reduction more than like increasing the clock speed overclocking, so it's a little bit different Okay, so we see a score of 14 Point no I missed it okay, we'll try again I Apologize for that I guess I could in theory have just turned off the camera and gone back and read it, but I Didn't think of that until now and the camera's been running so we might as well roll with it Okay, so fourteen point two nine that seems a little bit higher to nine Zero okay, so I'll run my 3d mark benchmark, and then I will be back in a moment Okay well at 18,654 3d marks we don't see a huge performance difference between our stock 999 27 timings and are tightened up 777 20 timings But this has been my ddr3 overclocking guide I mean if especially if you're done overclocking your CPU because that's where you'll see some big performance gains And you want to tinker with it a little bit more I highly encourage you to go ahead try overclocking your memory Don't forget to do stability checks though all along the way when you're doing any overclocking and bear in mind of course that my Results today are not necessarily reproducible if you buy the same RAM I was lucky enough to get a 25% overclock in terms of frequency or a significant to speed grade Bump down in latency so improvement in latency, but you may not have the same results So the best way well not the best way But the way that I use to to check if memory is stable is I use prime 95 blend I use a custom one and then I go ahead and let it use all or most of the memory I have installed in the system so as long as this doesn't crash over a period of 8 to 12 hours You can assume that your RAM is pretty much stable And then that way even if it's only a small improvement you can have some performance improvement So thank you for checking out my guide Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips as well as NCIX com for all of my videos