A lesson in extreme under clocking...buy dominator ram

[audienceofone]

Buy dominator ram and (from my experience) you will be on a crash course on how to under clock the ram to make the system stable.

 

Note that Corsair test results for the 8888 dominator series were based on 2 gigs at 800MHz, not at 1111MHz, which is the speed of these ram modules. I wonder why?

 

Here is what I have painstakingly found on my system:

 

Run 2 gigs of dominator ram and clock it at 1111MHz...you will hit (major) problems.

Run 2 gigs of dominator ram and clock it at 800MHz...no problems.

Run 4 gigs of dominator ram and clock it at 800MHz...you will hit problems.

Run 4 gigs of dominator ram and clock it at 667MHz...reduced problems, but the speed is less than 2 gigs at 800MHz.

Run 4 gigs above 6677MHz... forget it.

 

What problems have I had?

 

Run 4 gigs at 800MHz or above and you can expect the bsod telling you that the nvidia driver caused the problem. In-between the bsod you will also get the "display driver stopped working error." (TDR)

Run at 2 gigs over 800MHz and you can expect the "display driver stopped working error." (TDR)

Run 2 gigs at 800MHz and you should be OK.

 

What have I tried?

 

It would be easier to say what I have not tried to establish the results above. What I have found is that by doing nothing other than lowering the clock speed the problems disappear. I found this out after 6 weeks of experimenting and countless system rebuilds.

 

Will the 780 mobo fix this? Well I will be swapping out my 680 in the next few days, however I have already heard that the same problems occur on the 780 mobo. Not really surprising as the 780 is not significantly different if you take out the 3 card trick.

 

Will the 790 mobo fix this....well from what I can tell it will use DDR3, which will require a new memory controller. So maybe it will, but that's not much good if you have DDR2.

 

My guess is that DDR2 will be finished the minute the 790 mobo comes out and it is only being offered now at speeds above 1000MHz because it is trying to compete with DDR3.

 

The lesson? Don't buy ram over 800MHz unless you want a hole in your pocket and a heap of problems and don't go over 2 gigs. Going over 2 gigs just gives you a lot of pain for no gain.

 

If anyone wants to tell me that they have 4 gigs of this ram running above 800MHz with no problems, or 2 gigs at 1111MHz MHz I would be pleased to hear exactly how you did it, but I reserve the right not to believe you :)

 

 

If anyone whats to buy 2 gigs if dominator 8888 ram of me make me an offer.

[DJTachyon]

audienceofone,

 

I have a ASUS P5N-T Deluxe system now and have been having trouble with my 6400C3DF sticks...

 

I have a few more things to try, namely setting ASUS AI Tuning to "Standard", Enabling SLI-Ready Memory, and setting everything to auto.

 

I haven't built a high end system in awhile and didn't realize that "SLI-Ready Memory" enabled the EPP SPD profile.

 

Hopefully this will work, right now I am manually set at: 3-4-3-9, 2T (w/ Trc = 22 as well).

 

Voltage in the bios is set at 2.25 (because ASUS AI Suite in windows reports 2.35).

 

That is about as stable as I can get without setting as I stated above, we will find out in a couple hours.