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Questions about Memory.

TurtleOnSteroids
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I'm hoping someone here will be able to comprehensively answer some (or all) of my questions about Memory as some of this don't appear to make much sense to me.

 

1. I see many builds that only use two of the four ram slots and I was wondering if there was anything technical you have to do to get four sticks to work together?

2. Memory all comes with a set clock speed, but apparently when I put it in my system it will be set by default to run at 1333mhz . How do I get my memory to run at their full clock speed and are some boards limited in how high a clock speed they can run memory at?

3. How does one go about overclocking RAM? What are the benefits and drawbacks of overclocking your RAM?

 

If someone could please answer these questions for me I'd be very grateful,

Thanks

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Hi there,

 

1. A lot of people choose to only fill one bank of memory (enough to take advantage of all the memory channels) most likely to save money and/or to leave room for upgrades in the future. Very few people feel the need to completely max out their RAM.  

 

2. All systems will default to fail safe settings for memory, that's normal. You can manually set clock speeds and timings for memory in the BIOS or you could just use a XMP profile.

 

3. You can overclock your memory in the BIOS... benefits are faster memory, more bandwidth, lower latency, etc.... If you overclock your RAM successfully the drawbacks are little to none... you might end up using a little more power and producing a little more heat, other than that I don't see any drawbacks.  If you push your overclock too far your system may become unstable and that could cause crashes, BSOD and stuff like that.

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2. All systems will default to fail safe settings for memory, that's normal. You can manually set clock speeds and timings for memory in the BIOS or you could just use a XMP profile.

Could you elaborate on what an XMP profile is?

 

Also thank you for the quick response :)

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