First gen i7 ram upgrade advice

[johnspack]

Needing to upgrade my ram, 1st because I need my current kit to go into a folding rig, and 2nd because many things I do, or would like to do, require a lot more than 6gbs. I'll looking at 16gb quad channel kits, because tri kits are pretty much not available up here anymore. I also realized going over my mobo manual, that I can use all 4, with one being in single channel mode. So I guess I want to know if that can impact overall performance? Also, looking at this vengence low profile kit, because nothing else will fit under my fan:
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=62313&vpn=CML16GX3M4A1600C9B&manufacture=Corsair
For these, I'm wondering if they are capable of 1800mhz at 9-9-9-24 like my el cheapo gskills are doing right now, so I can stay at 4.1ghz. I eventually want faster ram when I go water, so these are pretty much temp.

 

[johnspack]

I have to think about it, as I do plan to go water on the cpu, so I could use ripjaws at a future date. I just can't fit them under my current hs. I can get a 16gb kit of same speed ripjaws for the same price, is there any point? From what I'm seeing, 1600mhz kits seem to all oc to 1800+ for the 1.5v kits. Crank up v to 1.6, away you go. Seeing as my 1st gen i7 will handle 1.65v no problem, why not? My selection is still very limited at ncix.com, they keep small stocks compared to the states. Any ideas will help here, I need to place the order on wednesday.....

 

[johnspack]

Problem solved, the newest ripjawz are low profile, so ordered a 16gb kit of 1866mhz. http://www.gskill.com/products.php?index=434&c1=&c2=
Still no idea however about any performance impact on having 4 dimms. It seems some mobos can map it to the first 3 in triple channel, and others map it to a single channel. Guess I'll find out for myself!

 

[johnspack]

Jeez, no comments? A guy at half the poverty level, buying a sexy kit of ram like this.... did I mention it can go straight into an sb-e system? If this stuff can do 2000mhz, which I suspect it will, it'll make a good starter kit for my sb-e system when I'm able to afford that. I admit, I go for days at a time without eating to do this, but I'm retired, don't care about anything else, so why not? True TPUer here!

 

[cadaveca]

Not much to say, John. Most users wit hthe LP Corsair sticks were not happy with them. I love my LP whites, but I know how to tweak subtimings to get ram to do what I want.

You decided a few days later to get 1866 sticks @ 1.5v. I tihnk you made the right choice. Personally, I want one of those sexy red kits myself; will have to ask G.Skill for one for review purposes when I get the current review done.


your comment about Flex memory mode is correct...4 sticks work in triple channel, with the fourht stick left un used on it's own channel until the first three are "full" or busy.

The sticks will work, for sure...at rated timings? Not so sure, but tweaking should make them fall in line where you want them.

Is there something I didn't cover? We'll have to compare notes after you get your kit and start playing.

 

[johnspack]

Thankyou very much for the response, you covered everything!
Also didn't know about the LP sticks, guess I dodged a bullet. And yes,
these cheapie gskills are oced 200 mhz, and don't even seem to realize it!
Think I'm going to love the 1866 1.5v ripjaws......

 

[newtekie1]

Why not get 3 dual channel kits and run everything in triple channel instead of having an odd stick out in single channel?

I mean you can get 24Gb of DDR3-1600 Patriot RAM for $160 CAD.

 

[johnspack]

I dunno, maybe because it's 16gbs of newest tech 1.5v ripjaws? It's a matched set of 4 dimms? Also because I'm sure I can get 2000mhz out of them, I seriously doubt the patriots will do that. I need 1800mhz just to keep my cpu at 4.12ghz, when I get water cooling, and want to go to 4.3-4.5ghz, I'll need a lot more ram speed. I need more ram, but I also need it to go fast. Best compromise.

 

[johnspack]

I'll post results when I get my new kit in here or my diary. Paid for and shipped now.

 

[johnspack]

Stage 1:

 

[johnspack]

First results at 1800mhz:

I'm still on a stability kick right now, with 16gbs of ram... but I will push further
eventually!

 

[Neuromancer]

Yeah the key is going to be where does your QPI fall down at. If you have a CPU that can easily pull 8Gs then 2000 MHz will not be a problem, not all will do that, ffewer still apparently go much past it (Personally I have not had any issues hitting 8G QPI but I only had 3 chips) Now going much past it.... thats another story 8.8 was my max.

 

[johnspack]

I think 2000mhz is possible, it will take serious tweaking with this much ram. I just checked taskman, and windows is idling at 6gbs ram now, never seen it use that much before even under load, never mind at idle! Serious caching going on....

 

[johnspack]

Just copied, and ran Homefront from a 10gb ram disk. It started instantly, and zero loading times while playing. Fning rocks! It's like running a game from an ssd, but 5x faster!

 

[johnspack]

Running my horribly slow loading flight sim from an 8gb ram drive now, incredibly faster! Turns out ramdrives are way faster than any ssd:

 

[BlackOmega]

very nice results John.

 

[cadaveca]

Tell me, John, what timings did you end up with?


Did you tweak the secondaries at all?

 

[johnspack]

I honestly haven't had time to tweak yet, still playing with just having so much ram! I will be working on that shortly. Need to find out final stable oc, and tightest timings I can get. But that will take a week or so of messing around. My imc seems to be pretty strong, so I suspect I'll get good results.

 

[johnspack]

Starting to tweak, but this will be a long process:

 

[johnspack]

Still playing with other junk... results of a 2gb supercache on a mechanical hds read performance:

 

[johnspack]

Okay, upgraded to supercache 5, and enabled lazy write, write speeds went way up as a result:

 

[johnspack]

Okay, supercache 5 is amazing. I set a 3gb cache on the partition my flightsim is on, and it loads as fast as using an 8gb ramdrive and running the whole sim from it. By the way, these caches are dedicated to the drive/partition you set it too, and are 10x faster than the fastest ssd. Really makes a difference! I'm using 5gbs ram total to cache my os and game drive, so still have over 10gbs, no biggie! And no, the windows cache does not do the same thing.