Kingston HyperX Blu 1600MHz DDR3 Overclocking Guide Tutorial Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,017 words · ~10 min read
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I have been promising a RAM overclocking guide for seemingly forever so I've got
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the Kingston hyperx blue 4 gig kit of DDR3 memory on my test bench today uh in
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addition to that I do have a hyperx RAM fan which I did an unboxing of a while
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back I found it to be extremely high quality I really like the look of it
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overall and the other relevant things that I have today on my test bench are a
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core i7 875k unlocked CPU so that's
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what's going on under the hood over here and then I'm using a p7p 5de premium
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motherboard in case you are wondering so the first thing we're going to do today
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is we're going to get everything set up for a baseline reading so that means
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I've got my CPU set up at stock frequency and I've actually turned off
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turbo mode so we are just going to be running it at peer stock frequency this
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is going to allow us to see exactly what
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impact just changing the memory has on an otherwise completely stable Baseline
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system okay the other thing that I've done is I've enabled the XMP profile for
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this memory so that goes ahead and changes all the memory timings for me
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Isn't that handy U make sure you buy memory with XMP if you don't want to
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fuss around with all of this stuff so it goes ahead changes the frequency to 1600
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MHz changes the timings to 9927 these are your primary timings the
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most important one is this one right here that is the Cass Cas latency so
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here this frequency that is the speed of the memory so that how how fast it
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Cycles around these ones are the delay
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so higher this and lower this is always better 1 n or 1 t or 2 N or 2T that's a
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secondary timing that does have an impact on performance as well and then
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these voltages that it's dialed in for me 1.65 that's the memory voltage and
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1.3 that is the voltage of the integrated memory controller on the CPU
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you should be aware that with core i7 and core i5 CPUs you should never go
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over 1.65 volts on the memory because you can damage the memory controller
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that is built into the CPU so we're going to go ahead take some baseline
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readings and then we're going to come back and play around with some of these settings a little bit and see how much
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more performance we can squeeze out of this memory now that we've got the RAM
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dialed into our stock XMP overclocked
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profile you can see here all of the settings are correct and the CPU is
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running at its stock frequency we're just going to take a couple of
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benchmarks as a base line here so Super PI is a popular memory Benchmark because
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what it does is it gives you uh probably
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the largest possible separation between
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uh like minute setting basically it's it's a very very fine way of measuring
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the the performance of the CPU and RAM
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and it'll give you differences that you otherwise wouldn't be able to measure so
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you can figure out if what you're doing is beneficial or not so you can see we
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calculated pi to 1 million decimal places and we end up with a result of
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zooming in so I can see oh no that's not right Calculate 1 million decimal places
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it's giving me the wrong one here so now click to start okay and let's find out
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what we get this time and we're going to take a quick 3D Mark reading as well and
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then we're going to come back to these benchmarks once we've played around with
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the frequency latencies of the memory and we're going to see how much we are
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able to improve our system performance so there there's the real value is
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14305
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seconds all right so we're going to run 3D Mark and then I'll be back in a
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minute once that's done so there you have it our Baseline
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3D mar06 reading is
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18534 so 1
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18534 3D marks it should also be noted I
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am running these benchmarks with turbo mode disabled on the CPU so it is
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running only at the default CPU multiplier of 22x it is not scaling up
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when I run intensive benchmarks this is just to isolate the RAM as the
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performance variable that we're looking at today so the first thing we're going
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to try today is leaving our timings at default leaving all the voltages the
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same cuz we don't really want to that's outside the scope of this particular
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video we don't want to Tinker around with those and what we're going to go
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ahead and do is take the CPU ratio and turn it down so we're still very close
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to the 2.9 926 Target CPU frequency and
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then we're going to turn up the base clock now turning up the base clock is
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going to give us a bit of a boost at equal frequency on the CPU and then it's
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also going to give us at the same DDR3 speed so go I'm going to go ahead so 146
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is where I'm headed so 133 is stock you can see at 133 the options I have are
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all of your standard DDR3 speed options but as soon as I go up to 146 that 1600
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MHz option turns into 17 50 so we're going to go ahead and see if
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we can boot up at these speeds and if we are stable and what kind of performance
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impact that's going to make okay I've done some tinkering around and staying
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within the same CPU frequency range so about 2.93 GHz I have found that the
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highest I was able to go was by lowering the CPU ratio to 17x and increasing the
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base clock to 172 so this gives us a DDR3 speed of 2.06 4 GHz the RAM was
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stable at this speed so we're going to take some more benchmarks and we're
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going to find out what we gained by increasing the memory speed to 2 GHz now
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one thing that I do want to point out is that you do not have to run the CPU at
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stock speed in fact there's probably more benefit to overclocking the RAM
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when you're running an overclocked CPU because the CPU needs more data to keep
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it fed but the reason that I did it this
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way is because what you'd normally do is find your max CPU frequency in this case
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I'm I'm pretending my Max CPU frequency is stock speed so You' find your max CPU
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frequency and then you'd tune the RAM from there so uh once you by the time
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you're tuning RAM you're already trying to stay within kind of a a fixed range
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of CPU frequencies so we'll go ahead fire up CPU Z fire up Super PI so you
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can see we're running our CPU at stock speed our RAM is now running
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substantially faster this is 1/ half of the actual data rate because it is uh d
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DDR class of memory so we're running
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start to calculate to 1 million decimal
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places so here we are we've seen a
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25% increase in RAM speed and let's see
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how much of a speed increase we will gain from that so
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14.22 7 is our new super
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pie 14.22 7 is our new super pie score and
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then we'll go ahead and have a look at the 3D Mark score in a moment so we end
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up with a score of 18692 which is a slight boost over what
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we were recording as our Baseline although it's pretty much within the
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margin of error uh so the overclocking method that we used today was just
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increasing the RAM frequency uh we found it didn't have much of an impact but
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look at it this way you buy the hyperx blue and obviously your results May Vary
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you can get upwards of a 25% increase in
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speed over what it's actually rated for which even if it only gives you like a
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1% increase in a couple of the programs
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you use it is a free increase nonetheless so we're going to see how
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low we can go with latency overclocking and see if we can get some bigger boosts
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that way stay tuned for more by simply adjusting the latencies we were able to
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go from 999 27 latencies all the way
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down to 77720 you consider the cost difference between kits that are
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otherwise basically identical so you look at kits like this where it's a 4
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gig kit uh 2x2 GB DDR 3600 and cl9
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versus cl8 and you see upwards of a $20
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price Delta well it starts to make uh like an overclocking friendly kit like
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the blue that we're using today look like a pretty good value if you can get
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all of that extra Headroom out of it so let's have a look at our super pie
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calculation for our uh 7
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overclocking in this case a latency reduction more than like increasing the
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clock speed overclocking so it's a little bit different okay so we see a
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score of 14
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point no I missed it okay we'll try
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again I apologize for that I guess I could in theory have just turned off the
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camera and gone back and read it but um
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I didn't think of that until now and the camera's been running so we might as
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well roll with it okay so 14.29 that
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seems a little bit higher
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290 okay so I'll run my 3D Mark Benchmark and then I will be back in a
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moment okay well at 18654 3D marks we don't see a huge
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performance difference between our stock 999 27 timings and our tightened up 7
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7720 timings uh but this has been my
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DDR3 overclocking guide I mean if especially if you're done overclocking
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your CPU because that's where you'll see some big performance gains and you want
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to Tinker with it a little bit more I highly encourage you to go ahead try
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overclocking your memory uh don't forget to do stability checks though all along
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the way when you're doing any overclocking and bear in mind of course
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that my results today are not necessarily reproducible if you buy the
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same RAM I was lucky enough to get A2 5% overclock in terms of frequency or a
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significant uh two speed grade uh bump
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down in latency so Improvement in latency uh but you may not have the same
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results so the best way well not the best way but the way that I use to uh to
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check if memory is stable is I use prime 95 blend I use a custom one and then I
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go ahead and let it use all or most of
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the memory I have installed in the system so as long as this doesn't crash over a period of 8 to 12 hours you you
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can assume that your RAM is pretty much stable and then that way even if it's
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only a small Improvement you can have some performance Improvement so thank
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you for checking out my guide don't forget to subscribe to Linus techtips as
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well as ncixcom for all of my videos