starting to overclock my ram ... ?

[racerjosh]

im currently thinking of overclocking my RAM so that i can get a bit more out of it .. porblem is i dont no how to and ive read some of the tutorials and they make no sense

anyway.. my specs are..

AMD 64 X2 dual core 4000+ 2.11GHz

nVidia 8600GT 256MB

1.00GB of RAM (OCZ DDR2 PC2-5400 / 667MHz / Value Series)

now .. i have no idea on how to find what the RAM is running at and what the FSB is running at .. special programme?

i dont mind much of a boost but just a little .. since COD4 is using around 500,000K -700,000K when im online. id also like a bit more just to help out my FPS aswell (dont want to buy new RAM yet .. just want to overclock .. if possible)

soo .. how do i go about doing it ?

[The Computer Council]

Hi there,

What motherboard do you have?

You may be able to squeeze a little more performance out of your machine, if your BIOS allows overclocking. For the likes of current games like COD4 though, for higher FPS, it may need hardware upgrades.

If you google CPU-z for a start, this will tell you what your current FSB and RAM speeds are.

Note: seen signature for motherboard.

Does the BIOS allow you to alter FSB/voltages etc?

[racerjosh]

ive had a look through and i cant see anything that stands out that will et me .. but ive started to use n-tune to overclock the RAM, CPU and GPU

ive had them all to decent'ish settings (to what the pc is capible of) with some good results .. but i think im going to have to buy some new RAM anyway since i need an extra 512MB-1GB extra .. as for everything else (apart from the GPU) they can wait

[!TIMMY!]

With the price of DDR2 atm, I would get a nice 2 x 1gb PC6400 kit for around £35 like this from Komplett.

[Mul.]

In my honest opinion I don't believe that you'll be able to get a lot more out of your OCZ PC2-5400 kit. As memory frequencies will run at a ratio to your CPU's own clock speed variables, the two ways to overclock your memory is to change said ratio or to overclock the CPU.

Changing the ratio will usually give you access to a few common ratio's, at which point the only ones above 667MHz would be around 800MHz. Due to the way that AMD CPU's derive memory speed, you might get something a bit over that, or something a fair amount below that, depending on the clock speed of your CPU. At 2100MHz, I'd expect you to have the option between 300MHz (DDR2-600 effective from 2100/7) and 350MHz (DDR2-700 effective 2100/6). Debatable if there's really any point.

The other way is simply to overclock your CPU. Be adviced that when overclocking your CPU, it'll be a must to reduce your CPU's LDT Multi from 5x to 4x as it's advised to keep overall Hypertransport speed below 1000MHz (Hypertransport speed is your bus speed which is 200 by default multiplied by a certain multi, usually 5 by default to give 1000)

On the whole, I honestly reckon that overclocking your RAM really won't bring home any noticeable benefits. You'll notice far larger benefits by overclocking the CPU, switching over to 2GB RAM (PC2-6400 kits are £35 and below now) and perhaps a faster graphics card when funds allow.