Is it worth sidegrading 1600Mhz DDR3 to 2400Mhz?

[Oddball]

I am currently running 16GB of CMZ16GX3M2A1600C9 on a Intel i7 4770K with MSI GD65 Gaming motherboard. I currently only have the CPU overclocked slightly to 4.2Ghz with boosting enabled (No doubt to go higher I would need to disable Speedstep and maybe raise the voltage to get anywhere near 4.5Ghz).

 

What I need to know is if it's worth me sidegrading from 1600Mhz to 2400Mhz for gaming purposes. I know not all games scale with memory but some get big gains.

 

Is it really worth buying 2400Mhz and selling on the 1600Mhz to offset the cost?

[emissary42]

Some apps and games respond well to the additional bandwidth, others just don't. So it depends, if anything you are actually using is somewhat limited by memory performance. When you barely had to pay any premium for DDR3-2133/2400 over DDR3-1600 the choice was easy though.

 

You could also try to overclock your memory, instead of just buying something else. If your kit is Ver4.xx or Ver5.xx based then DDR3-2400 is quite possible at moderate volts.

[Oddball]

I have no idea what version I have. I got it in the first quarter of 2014. What voltage is a safe to go up to?

[emissary42]

You can find the Version number on the label at the heatspreaders. The official safe voltages vary with IC type, the Hynix and Samsung stuff can handle much more than you would need to get them up to DDR3-2400.

[Oddball]

Thanks again. I will take a look when I put a new GPU in in a couple of days and post back which version I have. Hopefully you can give me a guideline voltage to try to get to 2400.

[emissary42]

For both versions try timings of 11-13-13-31 2T and 1.65V. If your board fails to train secondary timings and VCCSA on AUTO, you might also have to adjust those as well.

 

Edit, secondaries: 350-7-15-11-11-36-8 (tRFC-tRRD-tWR-tWTR-tRTP-tWCL)

[Oddball]

My kit is only version 3.24. Can I get anymore out of it?

 

EDIT: I tried overclocking to 2400 but it tells me it failed at boot (MSI GD65 Gaming motherboard). I tried your timings but it also failed. I think I put them in the right place. I think you missed out a setting for -36- but from logically looking at the settings I think I put that in the right place (tWCA or something I can't recall without looking).

 

I've set everything back to auto and set the frequency to 2200Mhz @ 1.65v and it booted fine. I am running Orthos blend test in the background to see how it fares. If there is no other settings I can try to get to the magic 2400 mark I will just leave it at 2200 and be happy with it (if it passes the stress testing that is).

 

The timings for the 2200 are 13-13-13-34-287-2T according to CPU-Z.

[n3m37h]

Hey, I have the same board but have G.Skill ram (1600/2133OC / 16gb)

The easiest way is to set the frequency, link the ram and set the voltage.

I used 1.65v to achieve 2400 but 3 years of that and I had to drop it to 2133/1.62v due to the RAM not being able to handle it anymore

The mobo is smart enough to set all the timings to a workable rate and go and tweak it from there.

You might be lucky like I was and get it to hit 2400mhz but in reality you won't see any gains from 2133-2400

Also trying to match your timings with someone elses does not always work due to the nature of the nand business. You can have 2 different packages of the same ram with nand from 2 different companies or even the same company but different batches.

Also, you may of just been unlucky and get a set that can't handle anything over say 1866mhz for example

Hope this helps