I'm looking at getting a Q6600 and overclocking it to 3ghz. I'm relatively new to this whole overclocking lark, as i've never really had a need to, so I'm wondering how important decent ram is to the overclock? I know that a stable PSU and a good motherboard and a good heatsink are necessary, but do I really need to invest in some top of the range OCZ's or Kingstons, or would I be just as well off with some Crucial Valueram? Thanks, Andy
basically when it comes to overclocking every thing is important. You need good RAM so it stays stable when you tweak the power level.
Erm, I have to disagree, if your looking for better benchmark preformance, then by all means yes get better ram, but with the amount of features on motherboards you can easily lower the speed to allow more cpu overclocking, I know 3 people with QX6700's oc'd to 3 - 3.6ghz all with generic ram, I the realworld differance in memory speed isn't worth the premum IMO. Though I'd look for some kind of DDR800 /PC 6400, generic stuff, that still leaves you pleant of room and it is very cheap, but all this PC9000+ stuff; more money than sense..... Ed: LeMaltor, sorry if looks like im ripping you, i assummed you were talking about more, high end, overpriced ram, that £90 Dominator looks sweet .
Yar, agree with Fr4nk on this. With the abilities to run ram speeds independant of CPU bus speeds ubar ram doesnt make a whole lot of difference. If you're shooting for ubar benchmarks then yea spending on ram is important. Otherwise not really. Ok-ish 6400 will be fine for most situations. Should give some headway over 400 FSB which is plenty for most CPU's evening running 1:1 ratio.
I agree with the others here. The rig spec in my link as you will see has Flex 9200 which is premium OC ram. I recently got around to testing the performance of my rig with both clocked & unclocked ram. Given the price I paid I'm less than pleased given the return on investment. Using 3DMark06 as a primary benchmark tool I (I know it's not the best for this and I will re-bench when I get the time) I saw a difference of 260 points going from 800Mhz-1142Mhz (Should do 1150 at least but P5N32-E Sli Plus hit's OC Wall at this speed with this memory). On an eVGA 680i with Memory at 1230Mhz I gained 315. I then benched using games and saw an improvement in 3-8 FPS which is nothing to get excited about. On the flip side though premium ram will increase your CPU's maximum clock which will give substantially better improvement.
In the past, uprated memory was much more important to overclocking, but these days are a bit looser. You would probably be better off using an unlocked processor and save on senselessly expensive memory if you buy many modules.
I suggest a nice kit of DDR2 800. The Q6600 is 266x9 (which means default ram speed of 533). Let's say you get to 3.6 ghz (400x9), that's the stock speed of DDR2 800. I suggest a nice kit of DDR2 800, as a result. Also, Corsair Dominator PC6400 uses promos chips. There are many better micron D9GMH / GKX based sticks for less money.
Thanks for all the advice guys - so basically, what you're saying is that DDR2 800 middle of the road stuff should be more than fine. I'm only going to bother overclocking it to 3ghz, so should have a decent bit of leaway...!
Second Bbq's comment about the Dominators. The PC6400 ones used to be handpicked Micron D9GMH or D9GCT like the other Dominators, but like almost all Corsair ram, the newer revisions use lower-grade ProMos chips. The G-Skill PC6400 HZ, all Crucial Ballistix and Buffalo Firestix are Micron D9. Most of the PC6400 Mushkin is also Micron D9GMH. From my personal experience with the chips, they managed DDR2-960 4-4-4-12 at 2.2v and DDR2-800 3-3-3-8 at the same voltage. This is a good list of what chips different DDR2 modules use. You want stuff in green, stuff in red is no longer produced, so modules in red have since changed ICs.
Don't go stupidely high end but highish end will be perfectly good enough. I'd spend more money on ensuring you have a nicer processor (In terms of OCing) because that will affect speed quite a bit more than memory.
Sorry to be a bit n00b, but could you please explain what all the numbers mean? And how do you know what is a good chip or not when you're looking at that list?!!? Thanks
Well, the Micron D9G** chips are currently regarded as the best overclockers on the market. The D9GMH being second best and D9GKX being the best overclocking chips on the market. Once you get to PC8000 and above, almost all modules are based on these chips. The easiest way to read it is by going that you want things in green, however, you want to really try and get something where ICs listed in green are the only ones shown for it, because that way you are going to get high-quality chips. If you are talking about the numbers as in 4-4-4-12 or 3-3-3-8, those are the latencies the memory is at, and I'm not too good at explaining them, but Wikipedia has a decent article on memory latency.
