Friday, March 31, 2006

Voltage

The natural instinct is to raise voltage in order to get higher memory speeds. The Infineon modules I'm using have taught me not to trust those instincts. I thought I needed 2.7v to run them at 265-270 @ 3-3-2. I found out during my own testing that they performed better with lower voltage. I dropped down to 2.65v, then 2.6v, and now I'm testing the modules at 264 with 2.55v. I've been running dual-Prime with those settings for several hours without a problem.

So how did I find this out? When I was trying to run the RAM at 272-273, I had trouble stabilizing the modules. As a last resort I raised the voltage to 2.8v and found out that made things even worse. That got me thinking. Maybe they don't like voltage. So I started lowering VDimm. The system won't boot with 2.5v. But 2.55-2.6v seems to be the sweet spot.

I'll keep testing and report any new findings.

Update: Core-1 failed after six and a half hours with VDimm at 2.55v. Core-0 was still going after almost ten hours before I stopped the test. Not bad. I'll probably stick with 2.6v because dual-Prime will run forever at that voltage.

4 comments:

sierrabound said...

My modules top out around 270-271 with 3-3-2 timings. After that, 3D quality gets very funky. The screen will intermittently go black.

For daily use, I run at 290X10 with 183 divider. That gives me around 264 for memory. These modules have no problems running at that speed.

sierrabound said...

You may have seen a different look to the blog. I was trying out other templates. Didn't like any of them, so I went back to what I was using.

sierrabound said...

Back on topic, I haven't tested the Infineons individually. But they passed Memtest at 270 (3-3-2).

It's really hard finding the golden pair. Only the company reps seem to have them. lol.

sierrabound said...

I agree about the layout being easy to read. I hate white type on dark backgrounds. It's much easier to read black type on a white background.