Kingston DDR3 RAM Memory Installation Guide Frequency Timings Voltage Settings Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,252 words · ~6 min read
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This is going to be a quick guide on how to install memory. I realize I might
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have sort of uh poked fun at anyone who doesn't know how to install memory in
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one of my recent videos. And for that, I feel terribly bad. But uh yeah, this is
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going to just be a basic guide. So, step one is going to be ground yourself out
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touching a pluggedin power supply. Just like that. Step two, you can see I've
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already installed two of this triple channel kit. So, two of the modules, but
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I'm going to go ahead and install the third module. Now this ASUS board, this
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is the Rampage 3 Extreme is a little bit different from most motherboards because
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on the one side these are not proper clips and on the other side they are
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proper clips. So what you do is you just push this side in. Okay? You make sure
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it's in the right spot. Push this side in. Okay? And then you push down the
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other side of the module until the clip goes in. Now if you had clips on both
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sides, then you'd actually push it in evenly and then the clips would go on both sides. It's fairly straightforward.
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Now, that was it for the physical installation, but this is the part that
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some people actually don't know about. If you install new memory in your system
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and boot it up, most motherboards are
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going to default to a safe setting rather than the actual capabilities of
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the RAM modules you installed. So, this motherboard is um I just put in two
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rather two 6 gigs of
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DDR3600 MHz. Okay. And so 1600 MHz is
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the speed and it also runs at C9 timings. Okay, overclocking failed.
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Please enter setup. Blah blah blah. Uh, press F1 to run setup. That's what I
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want to do. So you can see right here, it is not running at 1600 MHz. Right off
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the bat, we see that. So the first thing we're going to change is the DRM
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frequency. And yeah, I pressed the right button. So we're going to set that to
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1600 MHz. Select okay to use the current
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DRM voltage. uh something automatically.
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Oh, okay. Select cancel to increase the DRM voltage automatically if your dims
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require higher voltage. Well, we're going to do it uh we're not going to do
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it automatically. We're going to do it manually. And this is something that you
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may not be able to tell by looking at the modules or even by looking at the
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packaging. See, on these, all we can see here is a part number. So, with that,
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you can uh throw the part number on the Kingston website and then find out
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exactly what all the settings are you need for your RAM. So, there's the frequency, which is 1,600. We've already
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set that. Then there's the latencies. And usually for even for an intermediate
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to advanced user, you're only going to set four latencies. Um, and the most
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important one for performance is the CL or cast latency. So here we've got that
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set. And then the last one is the voltage. We're going to do the voltage
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next here. So this RAM is rated at 1.65 65 volts just like most DDR3 kits for
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Core i5 and Core i7 because it's not recommended to use a higher voltage than
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that for these chips uh due to the integrated memory controller. So, I'm
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actually going to go a touch lower. Most quality RAM is going to run at its rated
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speed even with a little bit less voltage anyway. But that's one of the
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ways to be able to Okay, here these are all the different ways to be able to
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tell a quality kit from a lower quality kit. Frequency, higher frequency is
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good. Latency, lower latency is good. and voltage. Lower voltage is good. So,
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the ideal memory kit would run at the fastest frequency with the lowest
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latency and the lowest voltage. Obviously, like anything in computers,
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it's always a bit of a trade-off, but this is a fairly mainstream kit. And uh
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let me just see if there's anything that we can do to get a little bit further
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into this RAM configuration. This is a very very performanceoriented board, so
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I'm sure I'm going to find something here. Uh might be under advanced CPU
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config. No, no. Sometimes you find the
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uh RAM settings under CPU these days because it is running off the integrated
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controller on the CPU. Uh it might just be a matter of setting Oh, cool. XMPP
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modules. Yeah. Or XMPP profiles. This is another thing I wanted to talk about. Uh
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this is a way for your RAM to have a little setting on it that tells your
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motherboard what all of its default settings are. So here you see 1600 MHz
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99927. That's the latency. uh 1 N. So
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that's like kind of like the old onet 2T timing. Uh one is better. And then
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you've got 1.65 volts to 1.4 volts. There you go. Look at that. So XMPP is a
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pretty cool thing. EP is the NVIDIA equivalent. And then the other one is
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CPU ROG and then manual. So if we go to
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manual, then I'm guessing it will actually let me set something other than
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the DRAM frequency. Here it's going to give me that warning again. Memory
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configuration. Ah, timing control. Here we go. So, here you can see it's already
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set to almost the right things, but I can actually set the latencies myself.
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So, you can either go in and set the all the uh frequency, latency, and voltage
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yourself, or you can 27 was actually what it was rated
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for. And then, let me just see if I can find the Ah, yes, one end. Here we go.
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So, now it is set manually to what it's supposed to be. Or if you want to make
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life easy for yourself, you can just go in
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and 65. Oops. Oh, I just almost set my
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CPU voltage to 1.65. Bad. Bad. Very bad.
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Uh 1.65. There we go. Or you can just use
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an XMP profile to do it for you. So, I'm just going to reboot and show you that
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now we have not only installed our RAM, but we have also configured it to work
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properly. My next guide will probably be more like
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RAM overclocking and how to do that because it's it's actually quite simple.
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You just turn the frequency up, turn the timings down, and turn the voltage up.
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It's basically like CPU overclocking. More frequency, more
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volts, and then profit. So, here you go. Everything's
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going to be set the way it's supposed to be. And wasn't that fun? Thanks for
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checking out my video blog and my guide on installing and configuring your new
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memory modules. And a big thanks to Kingston for providing this RAM. Don't
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forget that if you are subscribed and you leave a comment under my unboxing of
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this Kingston 6 gig kit, then you can be qualified to win it.