Hey guys I specifically bought the MSI B75A-G43 motherboard because it supports 1600mhz RAM unlike a lot of other budget motherboards I was looking at. Upon further inspection, it appears as though I require a 22nm CPU to utilize the extra RAM speed. Rather peeved to be honest as this was not mentioned on Scan.co.uk, is there anyway to unlock the extra speed? If not, does it matter much? I mean, the difference between 1333 & 1600?
Sandybridge supports DDR3 1333 MHz as native clock. Anything above is treated as an overclock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bridge
Yup. Sometimes, based on the motherboard, BIOS, and memory, if you set "eXtreme Memory Profile" to Profile 1 in the BIOS, the motehrboard will automacailly perform a small overclock to reach faster speed. In my case, my Core i7 930 only support 1066MHz memory. With my 1600MHz memory, my memory is clocked at 1333MHz. I knew that before purchasing my RAM, I got them because it was the same price... plus slower timing for this speed.
Shoot. My motherboard has something called OCGenie which I can activate in the BIOS but I doubt that would have an impact :/ Thanks for the help guys
Look in your BIOS under memory settings, for "XMP" or "eXtreme Memory Profile". Most high-end boards have it. Oh and while you are there, be sure that your SATA controller, is set to AHCI and not IDE (can also be called: Legacy or Compatibility). It has nothing to do with your RAM, but just a friendly advice to take full advantage and a nice performance increase from your HDD, and support TRIM for SSD's. Many forget about it.
Nope all of the Memory OCing utilities are locked on my motherboard I'm afraid . Yeah it was already set to ACHI, but thanks for the advice
No, unfortunately (as far as I'm aware) there is now way of running faster than 1333 without using an Ivy Bridge chip.
First off, no it really doesn't matter much. The difference between the speeds won't be very noticeable in everyday use, only in synthetic benchmarks might you be able to distinguish the difference. Secondly, sandy bridge will happily let you overclock the ram above 1333mhz (mine is at 2133mhz ) but the motherboard is the key, if your board won't allow you to do it then that's it. I'm surprised it won't, but I don't know what the bios is like for your mobo
That's good to hear, I don't really mind the reduced speed knowing that As noizdaemon666 says, my motherboard is B75 chipset and knows my CPU isn't 22nm so refuses to OC
Ahh that will be that then. I really wouldnt worry unless you are doing memory intensive work or are in to benching your rig. I ran mine at 1333mhz for ages while getting my CPU overclock stable and it was just fine. I only overclock my current ram because i can
